Who’s the dumbass, Minister?

Dear Minister Gordhan (I will not call you Pravin, because, your ego being bigger than SAA’s debt, I don’t want a dressing down):

Firstly, let me recommend a little piece of paradise just outside Vaalwater in Limpopo. You may sit there with your gin and tonic (or Blue Label – whatever Cabinet’s choice of tipple is these days) and see the sun sink gloriously over the endless Waterberg bosveld.

You feel all is well with the world. That’s where we were last week when you rather tetchily said that everyone who is opposed to another South African Airways bailout is “financially illiterate”.

Minister, I will take your word – as a qualified pharmacist and long-time member of the South African Communist Party (which, as we know, as has somewhat unconventional definition of “financial literacy”) – that, when it comes to matters of high state finance, I am as dumb as a rock.

But I don’t think throwing good money after bad (R72 billion has been poured into the state airline over the past decade) is a particularly good idea.

Apparently, apart from being dof, I also don’t care about the poor employees at SAA who might lose their jobs if the airline is closed down.

The reason we complain (and most of us doing the complaining are taxpayers, who pay your salary, Minister) about government employees and those at state-owned enterprises is that they seem to be “Royal game” when it comes to sucking it up and sharing the financial burdens of Covid and the years of mismanagement brought about by your party, Minister.

Because of the Covid crisis, I had to take three months’ of pay cuts and was forced to take leave – as were my colleagues. But no civil servants had to endure similar belt-tightening.

Comrade Tito says he is going to freeze government wages for three years but we all know you’ll cave-in at the first sign of a strike.

Here are some numbers which I, as a economic sciences dumbass, need explained to me, Minister.

The civil service wage bill has risen by 51% in 10 years. But service delivery has, in many areas, gone down dramatically. What am I missing in my ignorance of “government processes”, Minister?

A person earning R30 000 a month (probably your cellphone bill) will be paying, in taxes, more than R1 100 a month to “education” and roughly R600 each to “health” and “police services”.

More than R500 of this taxpayer’s monthly money transfusion goes to pay the interest on the loans the ANC government and the state-owned enterprises (your department, Minister) have racked up.

That’s assuming the money ends up where it’s intended … but we all know it doesn’t, don’t we Minister? We may be stupid, but we’re not blind.

Thanks to Comrade Tito’s medium-term budget speech, we know that money for SA Air-ways (SAA) will come out of many humanitarian budgets, like the R224 million slashed from the HIV, TB, malaria and community outreach grant; school infrastructure (R336 million) and emergency housing grant (R273 million).

This means, to a simpleton like me anyway, that the ANC’s promised better life will be for SAA employees and money is being redistributed from the poor to the affluent (those who can afford subsidised air travel). Or did my stupidity get in the way again, Minister?

I await Enlightenment.

Your long-suffering victim Joe Taxpayer.

Brendan Seery.

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