Young bull: Let's run down this hill and cover some cows
Old bull: Let's walk down this hill and cover ALL the cows
In Part 2, I compared state pension payouts from more countries in the world, not confined necessarily to countries that would have hosted liberation fighters, though most of them would possibly have done so. I also suggested one simple strategem to turn SA around quickly: digitise the justice system.
In this final part, I consider pensioners as a resource, toward dramatically relieving poverty levels in reasonable, quick and simple steps.
Looking at the tables in parts 1 and 2 reveals that SA still tops the SADC charts, but trails woefully against everywhere else worldwide. I wish to speak plainly here:
Our grant of R 2315, grateful as I am for it, buys around six plastics
of groceries. It does not cover rent for even a single room without a bathroom. Its spending power is enough
for a survival diet, soap and toothpaste. That's it. Can we accept that it supports life but not dignity? How can anyone seriously come up with a figure like that, end then raise it a paltry R10 when inflation
knocked it down by R120 in real spending compared to last year? Clearly, whoever did is out to lunch, a much better lunch than a senior can dream of. Doubling all the SASSA Old Age
grants to R4,600 per person is still inadequate, but we will take it. It will cost R9 billion per month, but it will equate to seven new R 350 relief grants flowing into 3.7 million
pensioner's pockets every month, at no extra administrative cost.
Everyone will wail where will the money come from?
That is easy: A government routinely wasting a cool trillion here and there should have no problem finding it, and anyway,
for some good starts:
Why would we elect people and then want to kill them? Prime Minister General JC Smuts, for years, even as an old man, used to hike alone up and down Table Mountain. Why are these people such cowards? They should be us
, not they
. Cavalcades are an American mafia style aberration. #bluelightsmustfall
watchincidents have increased 51% while trains decreaed by 75%. It's the musician equivalent of playing for a quarter of a set, but messing up three out of four bars. Imagine three crashing clams and one sweet bar of music. Ugh. That is all the math we need. The regulator's method is get rid of rail, so there is nothing for us to do, then hold lavish awards junkets. Unbelievable. Having successfully dismantled main line passenger rail for their buddies, the taxi industry, and with few freight trains to attend to, it is time for them to go. It was a fruitless waste of money. Hamba! fuseka!
It will lose money at first. With an estimated 60% percent of our grootkoppe changing out of Armani suits and Gucci shoes into orange overalls and bandietskoene. The resulting loss to the fiscus of their personal tax may be a shock. However, they know full well that their is real talent waiting in the wings to take over and the lost tax will prove to be a blip on revenue radar. We will soon recover, and forever. It is worth it.
There is a happy and ironic affirmative action style component to doubling senior grants: it will favour black households. Their seniors, unlike most white seniors, tend to live out their days with family, not paying stiff rents as whites do. Since black pensioners typically instantly give their grants to the wider family, doubling grants will dramatically increase money available to many families, most importantly their youth.
Six hundred thousand over-65s do not draw a SASSA grant. Apart from their skills, expertise, experience and wisdom, they can probably spare R100 pm. Contributing R100 pm each could pay for a lot of good things. Six hundred thousand people saving R100 pm for 18 months until the local elections could raise R 1 Billion.
Rebbeca Davies from Daily Maverick has exposed several social media influencers
who accepted R250 per tweet. Social media is the new lingua franca of election campaigns. Its adherents believe any catchy thing. TikTok is the pied piper of gullibles. Since at least one party has resorted to this, they should realise that others can play that game too.
I love our youth: R 45 million could pay for more than 11 million tweets. That amounts to posts by 340 influencers per day until the local elections. That's four posts per minute!. Staggering figures. I doubt anyone will want to pay that much for influencers alone: they would want to augment with other strategies, but the numbers are large.
We are nice people: daily, we contribute money to that most futile and useless aberration of industry known as car guard
. It would surprise me to learn that a single one of these
sidewalk experts has a driving licence, let alone has ever driven a vehicle. I shudder to think what these souls will do when, within ten years, our cars will park themselves. Many vehicles
can already. That will be yet another formal sector dead end. I suppose, being us, we will simply continue to pay, as we both watch the car park itself.
It would also not surprise me to learn that they and thousands of our unemployed youngsters would happily
toyi-toyi for a day for R500 per protest day. That's what nurses want per day for pushing a wheelchair aound. Both are hard work. I would love to hire somebody to toyi-toyi for me!
What a win!
Everything is open to abuse, and there is always someone who will try. However, this can be smartly systematised: