THE NATIONAL BUDGET. AN EXERCISE IN FAITH, PLENTY HOPE, ZERO CHARITY

 

In the days when the minister got one of his underlings to carry a small potted aloe to his budget speech, there was something different from the previous year to look at and wonder about during the speech. You could wonder if it was the same plant as last year. These days the aloe has gone, and the overwhelming feeling is “same old, same old”. There is so little wiggle room on both the revenue and expenditure sides of the SA government’s budget that it is getting tedious. Little tweaks here and there nothing revolutionary or exciting to try and get this nation going again and crucially decrease the government’s share of the pie.

One welcome aspect of the keeping things as they were is National Treasury’s publication of all the figures just as soon as Minister  Enoch Godongwana. begins his speech. All the usual documents in all the usual layouts are so useful.

Amongst the documents one will find is a useful two-pager focussed mainly on the revenue side and detailing all the changes to the way they have found to make the pips squeaks. The document is almost identical in format from one year to the next and provides a useful reference. It’s called the Tax Pocket Guide and while no longer printed like that it will, with coaxing, fit in a pocket and provide a source with which to bore small children and terrify taxpayers.

As remarked already there is almost no room left for bold and clever displays of policy change and incremental tweaks. Optimism, however, is rampant. Minister Godongwana  thinks he should collect R1.72 trillion in the forthcoming tax year. This is 18% higher than ever collected by Treasury in a comparable period.  He does believe that he will be able to rein in cabinet to spending just R2.09trillion yielding a deficit of a mere R356 billion. This is a heroic call. It is two years since such a small deficit was recorded.

One detail which merits comment is that Home Affairs is one of the smallest spenders in the state at R9.7bn. This suggests that it costs a mere R200 per citizen per year to capture and keep our details and share them with us whenever we need a vault copy or what ever. That’s not bad really.

Higher Education minister Blade Nzimande is determined to be in the limelight. His department will complete planning work on the formation of two new universities for South Africa this year. A university of Science and Technology sounds grand but how a campus on crime detection and fighting fits an academic program, is unclear. Blade is really excited and has all but written the course notes already. He has already declared the subjects to be Data Science, Machine-learning, Artificial intelligence, Blockchain and  Robotics. As well as his pet subject of Hydrogen-powered technologies. Now normally new university departments grow out of the enthusiasm and energy of existing staff members of a related discipline who set off down a new path where funding and their own interests take them This happened 40 years ago when writing programs for computers morphed into a whole discipline named Computer science. Simply painting the word Blockchain on the door doesn’t identify if it’s a real subject worthy of academic effort. It’s the other way round. Intriguingly Enoch’s second campus will be used to improve the quality of general and specialised South African Police Service investigations. A degree in gumshoeing. Well well!

The idea is to give every SA household 10 Gigabytes of free data. The nature of the beast is that depending on the users in the household this is either way more than required for letters to granny or a risible amount for a data miner. A market of unused allocation is bound to start up. One really does form the impression that that the decision makers mostly have no idea what this allocation is or involves but have been told this is a “good thing”.

James Greener

Friday 25^th February 2022

MEV. BALLS SE TUISGEMAAKTE BLATJANG[1]

Apparently, the Cuban government is a little short these days and have been round at Cyril’s place shaking the slotted tin. He has promised them R50million. With local provisional tax payments due at month end, this provides a perfect opportunity to see how popular this idea is with South Africans who are not President Frogboiler. Just ask taxpayers to make their payments directly to Cuba and keep a running total. We might all learn a great deal about socialism and solidarity. An extra dollop of irony accompanies this topic since much discussion is currently taking place in SA about the need for a Basic Income Grant. 

This is also the season when claims are made by young people who believe that the various models of how to provide free post school education are sustainable. This of course can not be true and disappointment and protest are imminent. It is all so sad because this grievous utter waste of human resources will in all likelihood just roll over year after year while talking heads and egregiously overpaid “elites” fail to provide leadership and reality.

The second volume of the Zondo Commission report has been released, and a weighty tome it is. Based on the squawking being posted on the internet, there are two classes of readers who are actually wading through it. The first are those who are mentioned in the report and their responses are mostly along the lines of “See! I told you I wasn’t doing anything wrong”. Umm. Perhaps not! The second group are the more diligent, curious and hopeful. They expect to find the information needed to put people behind bars.  Experience suggests however, that no one, especially President Cyril will do very much. As Tidemarks has long observed, he is a very disappointing national leader, seemingly too timid and compromised himself, to dare offer any goose more than a mild and conditional booing.

Tidemarks has never been to anything as grand as an Expo so my reaction to my nation’s exhibit at something called Expo 2020 Dubai is probably churlish. But pictures that have been published do suggest a display which is not much more than the back wall of a particularly well stocked Spaza Shop. It’s certainly wonderful to see how many grocery items we as a nation manufacture and how colourfully they are packaged. Exciting stuff and for everyone’s sake I do hope huge and ongoing orders have been written. To ensure true authenticity I hope that they arrange for a shoplifter to call at the exhibition stall regularly. The signs warning people not to touch are rather grubby and amateurish though. Maybe my disappointment arises from the fact that we do seem to be attending an event dated 2 years ago.

The BBC website sports pages are hosting fascinating, droll and quite lengthy articles which pretty much covers all one might want to know about the imminent Winter Olympics in Beijing. Two-man luge is an especially bizarre sport. Understandably the BBC pieces are a bit top heavy about the prospects of GB athletes, but particularly interesting snippets are that very little, if any, real snow will be used for the games. Odd that, you’d think there should be plenty of the proper stuff now that climate change is so common.   Secondly, since the world has decided that Grade 8 biology is incapable of distinguishing between boys and girls, sporting codes have given up on deciding how to arrange equitable competition. The development is that more events for mixed teams are on the program. There is no one yet wise enough to separate the genders for single sex events so controversy is still inevitable. The USA team have been advised that it is not a good idea to discuss politics with the hosts. Indeed.  

There is something rather disturbing about watching rugby being played in weather conditions which mimic the surface of the sun. Money of course is the reason, but it is still unpleasant. What is fun however is watching the Bliztbokke rack up the silverware in the Sevens Tournaments. What’s that you say? Fiji and the All Blacks are in quarantine. Well shame.

James Greener

Friday 4^th February 2022

---

[1] A  much loved and iconic local chutney. Created by Mrs Balls of Kingwilliamstown.