The key to a good drama is a solid and believable storyline in which ideally the good guys win. Then you can put the book down or switch off the TV and get back to real life. This is why the melodrama playing out among the ANC, the DA and ActionSA is no fun at all.
To start with, the winner is the ANC, which will now get its VAT hike next week. Then, the storyline is weak. Herman used to be John’s friend but they fell out. John thinks taxing people too much is bad and Herman agrees, but now Herman has started his own group. Herman is so angry with John that Cyril, who is a big deal and dislikes everything John stands for, saw an opportunity to attack John. He gambled that Herman and some other people who used to be John’s friends, like Mmusi and Patricia, would be so distracted by the idea of hurting John that they wouldn’t care that they were kneeling on the neck of the poorest South Africans. Cyril was right.
Worse, this is a slasher movie you can’t turn off and the blood is real.
Perhaps the most astonishing thing in the whole VAT gemors is that it seems there are smaller parties that believed the ANC was telling the truth when it said it would seriously look at proposals to avoid the VAT hike, having passed the budget framework. Rise Msanzi’s Songezo Zibi wrote in Business Day ahead of the 2024 election that “as long as the ANC is in power, the bonds that have developed between its leaders at a local and national level on the one hand, and corruption and crime networks on the other, will remain in place”, and yet his party voted to trust this same ANC it sees as responsible for “deeply systemic political decay”. For their own reasons, the PA, the PAC, Build One South Africa, ActionSA, GOOD and the IFP did the same.
Perhaps in thinking “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” they forgot that this was not a game. In their excitement, perhaps they forgot that the ANC has for more than 15 years been a highly tuned patronage machine with an impressive but distant history, for which the real world is a mysterious land of law, compliance and suffocating tax. A sugar tax on joy. A carbon tax on mobility and comfort. VAT on almost everything. Transfer duties on social mobility and the reversal of apartheid spatial divides. It even taxes books to ensure people don’t read too much.
Anyone who bills for anything that attracts VAT is currently up to their ears in administrative manure. We’ve all had the e-mails. Pricing is being adjusted up. People who sell things will also need to adjust forecasts down and manage inventory downwards to accommodate the coming contraction. People who make the things that other people sell will be planning on lower production and will be looking at input costs, such as labour.
More depressing, of course, is that the extra tax on everything from children’s clothes and shoes to Ricoffy, white bread, Fanta Pineapple and a locally built car will not fill finance minister Enoch Godongwana’s budget hole. Only cutting corruption and waste will do that. Everybody knows that you cannot tax a country to prosperity. That, however, only matters if you understand what creates wealth and if you feel you have a stake in it. In that regard, the ANC appears to be a lost cause. Those who know better but helped it anyway should apologise.
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