Time to stop fueling around – go and vote

There’s a picture that does the rounds on social media every few weeks, showing 15 lanes of gridlock, with hundreds of cars going nowhere.

Under this image is a caption: “In Germany the government has increased fuel price [sic]. In just one hour of time [sic] people abandoned their cars on the streets and avenues and walked home. Over a million abandoned cars. They had to lower the price. When the people are smart the corrupt can’t accomplish their goals.”

Every time the petrol price is about to rise in SA, that picture is everywhere, usually followed by enthusiastically revolutionary comments.

Yes! We should do this too! If it worked for the Germans it can work for us!

Unfortunately, it didn’t work for the Germans. The photograph was taken about 10 years ago, in China, of an immense traffic jam not a protest. There is no evidence that a mass car-stranding ever happened in Germany.

Still, an overtaxed South African can dream; and so that picture gets more airtime than Julius Malema and AfriForum combined.

I understand the desire to scream, but I don’t blame the government when the petrol price rises. The state has no control over the oil price and, barring the sort of wilful demolitions performed by Jacob Zuma, very little over the dollar-rand exchange rate.

As much as we like to pretend we’re masters of our own economic fate, we are, alas, a flea on a dog waiting at the door for his boss to return from the mailroom where he works, so we can be wagged this way or that.

What I mind, however, is when I spend my R15.43 on a litre of petrol over 12% of it is being flushed down a vast gurgling hole called the Road Accident Fund, or RAF.

In 1940 Winston Churchill praised a different RAF, saying: “Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.” As for our RAF, well, let’s just say that seldom in the field of human taxation was so much owed by so few to so many.

As reported last weekend, the RAF helped itself to R33billion last year. It is also bankrupt. Go figure.

Still, not being able to pay for stuff has never stopped anyone in this country from buying more stuff. And why would it when they never use their own money? Why pause for even a moment when you can just help yourself to more taxes?

Hence the Sunday Times revelation that a bankrupt agency is renting 300 office chairs for R500 000 a month.

I must admit, when I first heard that figure, I assumed it was wrong. R1 666 per month for an office chair? For this government? Hell no.

This lot spends 10 times that much in a day, hiring exwives to hire their sons to hire their best friends to hire cousins to supply chairs at a 1 000% mark-up, before parking said chairs in a warehouse and hiring former lovers to hire current lovers to issue denials about ever hiring chairs or abandoning them in a warehouse.

But as I read on I saw their first plan was to blow R60million of our money to rent furniture for five years.

Yes, I thought. That’s more like it: R12-million a year for some tables and chairs is the government I know.

The Road Accident Fund, in principle, a good idea. SA roads are some of the most dangerous on the planet. We’re astonishingly incompetent and aggressive drivers. There’s no meaningful policing of what, where or how we drive.

We are also completely okay with this. We march and emigrate and threaten civil war and tax revolts because 19 000 of us are murdered every year, but kill 14 000 of us on the roads in the same year and we simply shrug sadly and make plans to buy an SUV so at least it will be the other guy who ends up dead in the head-on.

Given the surreal homicidesuicide pact we’ve made with driving in this country, it makes sense for us to have a national insurance scheme that pays inevitable victims of this wholesale slaughter.

But unfortunately, the ANC hasn’t yet found a good idea it can’t bludgeon into a coma. Which is how the RAF rolled to a shuddering halt in its current cul-de-sac: a broken, bankrupted wreck weakly sucking on the taxpayer’s teat but too dysfunctional to turn any of its vast wealth into an actual system; visited daily by vampiric lawyers who gorge on billions who then wipe their mouths and say: “Don’t blame me, it’s the law.”

This week, as petrol became more expensive than ever. Calls for tax boycotts, were renewed. Facebook was awash with German-Chinese type photos. Radical solutions were demanded.

But the math is simple. If you keep voting for thieves, you’ll keep getting robbed.

The good news is there’s an election coming. So don’t park your car. Don’t blockade petrol stations.

Just vote.

What I mind is 12% of the R15.43 I spend on a litre of petrol going down a gurgling hole