OUR VIEW: Life is so unfair to people, especially the poor
Last week has seen the price of petrol rise to R16 per litre which will certainly mean increases in bus and taxi fares.
Is this a justifiable increase, being the fifth since the year started?
The bad news for the poor and low-paid communities is that wages and salaries never receive such an astronomical increase. The more expensive things get, the more unbearable life becomes for poor communities. One wonders why the government is not defending its citizens against such increases because as we speak, the poor are crying out for living wages, houses, adequate water supply and equal economic opportunities, otherwise reserved for a chosen few.
The rich get richer and the poor get poorer.
Just last week Thursday I attended a South African Sugar Association media engagement, where the sugar industry cried foul over the government allowing imports of sugar from foreign countries. As a South African-based company, they are now forced to lower their prices in order to share the spoils with foreign countries that do not have the interests of South Africans at heart, but are only here to rake in profits.
Another argument they put forward is that the bulk of sugar is grown by locals who have been empowered by the sugar industry to supply it. This scheme has increased production to greater heights, yet the foreign sugar arrives already packaged, thus not offering any employment opportunities for locals. The imported sugar goes straight onto store shelves.
This is not fair competition. If import legislation does not change, cane farms will have to close down and hundreds of jobs will be lost in the process. The initiative is in the government’s hands. They have the responsibility to save jobs by imposing higher tariffs on imported sugar. Why should our economy be ruled and dominated by foreign-produced products when we can produce our own?
At least July is Madiba Month. I hope the government, led by the African National Congress, can do this country’s people a favour and impose higher tariffs on foreign-produced sugar, because the people of Mpumalanga and KwaZulu-Natal, the two producers of sugar, will suffer. Do it for the sake of Tata Nelson Mandela.
