Katlego Sekhu
Former Mayor of Cape Town Helen Zille was recently on David Mashabela’s podcast, where she spoke about the ratio between South Africans who pay tax and those who receive social grants.
According to President Cyril Ramaphosa, the country’s economy has tripled since 1994, despite employment numbers increasing from 8 million to 16.7 million.
Independent Political Analyst and CA (SA), Khaya Sithole, joined Siz The World to weigh in on Zille’s utterings, as well as our lopsided economy in its entirety and how it can be overhauled.
Sithole pointed out that the numbers alone don’t paint a clear picture. He explained that Zille mentioned 20 million people on social grants, but 12.5 million of them are children.
“In that instance, those are not the type of people that should be expected to be taxpaying citizens at that particular stage.”
Sithole explained that the core issue here is that there is a real risk that those who are indeed in a position to be paying the type of taxes that are critical to funding this entire social wage.
“They will feel increasingly anxious to say, well, are we being disproportionately burdened by what the state is asking us to do? These individuals, in addition to the, let’s say, 45% tax trade, also feel that the state itself is not giving them the type of services that they expect to be getting from the state.
“So rather than feeling safe because the state has a really good security apparatus, you don’t feel safe so you spend money on private security. They will be spending much money on private education, for example, so it is the same individuals that are saying, We are paying our taxes and have undeclared additional tax burden because rather than us relying on the state to provide these services, we are having to fund them out of pocket and rely on the private sector.”
Listen to the full discussion in the podcast.
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