SARS boss the real rogue

Does Tom Moyane the SARS commissioner think that the general public are a bunch of imbeciles and will believe anything and everything that he says?

So, during his conference on Monday, he comes up with the following, after he criticised and rebuked everyone else as unethical and disingenuous, except the real culprits, by saying: “We do our work openly without fear or favour” (and when I listen to this expression my blood pressure rises as it has become the ANC slogan to put us to sleep and rob us blind) and continues with more lies, declaring that “we treat all the taxpayers without any favour whatsoever”.

Oh, really? Why then didn’t he go after the Guptas when they declared that their yearly income was about R1m and he accepted it as such without any querying?

He did absolutely nothing, because he is as compromised and complicit in corruption as everyone else appointed by Jacob Zuma — as time has shown, and this was the reason.

When Zuma was forced to reappoint Pravin Gordhan as our finance minister, one of Gordhan’s first requests was to fire Moyane because of the mess he was making.

Unfortunately, Moyane is still there and has managed to turn the most efficient government department into a shadow of what it was, dragging SARS down and chasing ghosts, while ignoring the retraction of the report as flawed by KPMG.

He is still hanging on to it because it suits his “agenda” of the so-called “rogue unit” and he still insists and wants to blow more of taxpayers’ money for this “witch hunt” instead of concentrating on the core of his appointment to collect and meet the revenue targets.

He already missed the first-quarter target by a staggering R13bn, although he declared and bragged that “we collected revenue, met the target and surpassed it” and, of course, as everyone knows, the deficit is growing by leaps and bounds and the projections for the full year is that it will top R50bn of a revenue shortfall.

We cannot live in an environment where our institutions and the criminal justice system are compromised and our crime watchdogs go after the finance minister and leave alone everyone else involved in the leaked Gupta e-mails, as not a single investigation has been instituted, as usual, for the well-connected.

J M Bouvier

Bryanston