The time to crush the head of the snake is now, or be squashed
Behold the python (or the ANC government, whichever occurs plausibly): for the longest time, herpetologists maintained that pythons killed their prey by suffocation. A python would bite its victim to establish an anchor and coil its body around that of the victim to suffocate it by incrementally tightening its coils at each exhalation by the prey until an excess of carbon dioxide and a privation of oxygen kills it.
Serial stranglers are well aware of its virtues, including the intimacy that the necessity of proximity to its victim affords the killer. Alas, this is true no longer. The Pythonidae, one Scott M Boback (PhD) and his gizmo-heavy propeller heads discovered as recently as 2015, kill quickly and elegantly by squashing the bejesus out of their prey so that venous back pressure exceeds the heart’s capacity, et voila, lunch is served.
But this doesn’t mean all the serpents in our world have got the memo. Some still swear by the death-by-increment method of predation.
Take the Cabinet, which approved a white paper earlier in 2017 that would compel citizens who plan to be out of the country for longer than three months to register with home affairs. Think of it as a coil tightening around your ribcage just as you exhaled with the knowledge that you have a postgraduate qualification and a potential sponsor elsewhere in the world in a more reasonable tax regime.
By taking names in the departure lounge at ORT International, it could be a matter of minutes only before the South African Revenue Service, if it sees the Treasury’s draft tax law amendments into law, lays claim to your tax advantage on income earned abroad. The injustice of this scheme is that the Treasury intends to tax citizens even though they derive no benefits from the tax thus levied.
Think of this as another rib-crushing coil tightening on your wallet and your universally accepted right legally to trade your skills to the highest bidder in conditions where you might want to pay tax on your hard-earned cash. Perhaps, understandably, it is difficult for less-privileged citizens to muster sympathy for those endowed enough to choose their country of residence. But that would be a mistake. The injustice proposed in the tax-law amendments applies to all taxpayers in SA: although we pay tax under a contractual arrangement with the state in exchange for basic services, the state is in default.
Even if we consider the abstract and loosely interpretable notions of poverty alleviation and economic transformation, the state is in breach of the social compact. Of all its many policy failures, the way the ANC government has neglected the most vulnerable people in the country must rank as its greatest failure. The Danegeld (as Investec Asset Management strategist Michael Power calls it in Business Day) the middle class pays to keep pitchfork-wielding peasants out of the market is of no avail. The fact is, even if 5-million taxpayers have kept 17-million social grant recipients alive, gratitude is the last thing we should expect at the inevitable storming of the Bastille.
WE HAVE BEEN RIPPED OFF, LIED TO AND MADE TO ENDURE PRESIDENT JACOB ZUMA’S UNSPEAKABLE TASTE IN FRIENDS
This day is upon us. Call it the drastic escalation of crime off an already high base or a gormless scramble for something, anything, that would improve one’s lot, it is not rational to reason with desperate people. So, those who can will leave SA and sacrifice their citizenship and cut all ties with the beloved country.
The rest of us will know that our resources have been plundered and frittered away in wasteful and unnecessary expenditure by the ANC government. We have been ripped off, lied to and made to endure President Jacob Zuma’s unspeakable taste in friends. And now we have run out of money (and are losing the capacity to generate more) with which to buy off the angry mob.
On Tuesday, when the National Assembly sits to contemplate dismissing Zuma (and his entire Cabinet, of course), the honourable members must decide whether to seize the rock provided to them and crush the head of the snake. It matters not whether the parliamentary ballot is secret or open to all of us to judge; the time to rid SA of Zuma and family and friends is now.