24.2.13

24 February 2013
Sunday
16h30

I am FLUMUXED. Absolutely FLUMUXED!
Last night I had dinner with a couple of friends. The conversation went through the one's pregnancy and the other's desire to have children and all the complications involved in making the decision and following through with it… then it moved on to family and connections and who's getting married to whom, as well as those in hospital or suffering through a hectic challenge. From there the conversation moved to the business sphere, both my friends have high flying careers, but I never realised just how high flying. The first spoke of the stock exchange and the income statements of private companies… one stock exchange company paid Income Tax alone of one point eight billion Rand! I nearly choked on my food… that’s no assets, no share value, no anything but the Income Tax. One point eight BILLION.
If I were to die tomorrow and someone took all I had and converted it to cash, I, personally, may be worth about 50 to 60 thousand Rand. Looking at that in figures… Shannan = R55 000.00; company’s mere tax amount = R1 800 000 000! One company, one tax payment… no wonder human life has become worth so little. So if the government are getting that from one company for one thing and there are thousands of companies in the country, what are they doing with the money?
I know in a Sunday Paper last week one of the ministers spent R2 100 000 on furniture for the office… I also know that the current damage to our school via water leakages in the Biology Lab ceilings is sitting at R1 250 000 and the pool pumps at R750 000. So why couldn’t the minister repair our roof and school pool instead of buying new furniture? The are both government owned…
Why do I have to pay road tax, income tax, toll fees, Value Added Tax on all my purchases, bank charges, rates and municipal payments on the income I earn that doesn’t cover all I need it to, when one company is paying R1 800 000 000?!?!

The other friend, who is in advertising filled us in on her story about the one client that has decided to rebrand itself, so they are spending over R2 000 000 on new stickers for some of their containers. Two million on stickers and 30% of the 1200 learners I teach can’t afford school fees as their parents don’t earn income that is enough for them to survive on…

On Friday night one of the guys mentioned that some of the professional sportsmen were picking up second jobs because their income had dropped by R240 000 a year… the income had dropped by that amount… it had DROPPED by around double the amount teachers earn…

I cannot get my head around this… I cannot fathom how one group in multi-corporations have one part of all of their companies paying billions in tax and down the road people are starving… why is the world ok with this? Why are citizens ok with their tax being used for furnishings? I cannot fathom how it is that private companies, as part of Black Empowerment HAVE to give money to charities, which we have hundreds of, and pay R1 800 000 000 in tax, yet people are homeless. How can the people in government sleep at night? How can they be ok with pumping millions into their homes and furniture and their cars when people are homeless and hungry? Why is the world ok with a human life being of so very little value… why? Another person in my block of flats was evicted this week as he has a back log of 6 months unpaid rent… but at least the ministers have beds to sleep in, maybe that’s why they have no hassles sleeping.

My one dear friend and her husband and two children had their one and only car repossessed this week. Another acquaintance has 2 cars in Durban, one for work and one for personal use, with a third car in Johannesburg, so he doesn’t have to hire one when he gets there… ja, some people get to sleep at night and others don’t.