For two years, I temped at SARS. One signs away the right to divulge anything about SARS at start of contract, so what follows confines me to personal memories: SARS-wise, there’s nothing to see here. Mr Edward Kieswetter, my ultimate boss at the SARS large business centre in Megawatt Park, and the current highly regarded SARS commissioner, has strolled into memory triggered by a news article about his contract ending soon.
Petrol: range anxiety
I don’t know what fuelled Mr Kieswetter’s hunch, but he pegged me as a decent and trustworthy enough person to ferry his family vehicle to Cape Town. He himself did not want to drive — he wanted to fly, but wanted his own car during his vacation. He supplied petrol money, and consented to me sharing the driving with a few others.
When I picked the car up from Mr Kieswetter, I met his family. I got a great welcome, with a special hello from his son Matheu, who knew about my time in the African Jazz Pioneers, and who himself was a trumpeter and aspirant orchestra conductor. Matheu and I were in touch for a time via social media. In time, he realised his dream to conduct a symphony orchestra.
‘Foresight is God’s last gift to man’
If there is one thing we have learnt since 1994, it is that the ANC is not big on foresight, save for when it turns its mind to funding voracious party coffers. I’ve even heard an insider say: ‘Corruption is bad, but it’s o.k. if you give some of the money to the party.’
This planning paralysis, at the end of the ANC’s Western Cape ‘moment’, may have affected Cape Town business folk at large, or maybe Cape Town is just quite simply, as per its nickname Slaapstad, a dozy city. At a recent Biznews gathering in Hermanus, which started fully attended at 07h00, Rob Hersov commented that Capetonians would just about be getting out of bed at that hour.
On that road trip, we found out just how sleepy, not long after passing Bloemfontein. Around Reddersburg, we ran into densely backed up traffic, both lanes and the shoulder, and could not see the cause.
Traffic toward Jo’burg was similarly sparse, and occasionally endangered by the usual yahoo drivers who detested our stupidity by being such goody-two-shoes moegoes that we stuck to our side of the highway. We then learned from a passing car that most towns between there and Cape Town had run out of petrol. We ourselves were running low, and this was bad news, because Mr K’s sturdy MPV was as thirsty as an Irish playwright.
The queue we were in was caused by people backed up for petrol in Colesberg, where, we were assured, there was still a supply. We had refuelled in Kroonstad, and planned to refuel in Colesberg, at the furthest stretch of the vehicle’s generous tank. Would there still be petrol, after a 200-kilometre double queue of cars had slaked their thirst? We doubted it.
I am an old gigster and roadie. Having done gigs all over the country for decades, many on back roads, and since we were within a kilometre of the Reddersburg overpass, I directed my co-driver to cross the grass verge, turn back, and take the exit ramp for Reddersburg.
“Are you sure?” chorused everyone in the car.
I was. He did that, and a few minutes later we were refuelling in Reddersburg. We then used the old road through Trompsburg and Phillippolis to jump the queue to Colesberg, where the old road rejoins the N1 near the old showgrounds. Looking back as we climbed the Colesberg koppies, we could see the flash and wink of windscreens in the sun, all the way back to the horizon and beyond the Shell Ultra.
With a lot of petrol in our tank, we took a chance, passed the deserted petrol stations with ‘No petrol’ signs at Hanover, and were able to refuel in Richmond. It’s a long hop to Beaufort West, but we got lucky at Nelspoort. We didn’t at Beaufort West, but the word there was that tankers were plying reliably up the N1 from Cape Town, and the scare was off if we could make it to Touws River. We did. It was a tired and tense crew that delivered Eddie’s car to his family in Bothasig.
We had a great time in Cape Town, and made our own way back in time. It transpired that Cape Town bizfolk knew two things full well:
- that it was likely to host half a million or more visitors over the Christmas holidays, and that
- South Africans, growing wealthier by the day (those were the days) had bought a million new cars during that year, mostly in Gauteng. which they also knew full well empties itself into the Cape on the Season of Migration to the South (nothing to do with this author: his book with that title was insightful about a black middle class).
Few people know today that we had a flourishing black middle class before the 1929 Depression. It is also not widely known that sex across the colour bar was outlawed in 1927, well before the admittedly approving National Party was elected in 1948.
Still, it never occurred to the oil men to lay in more petrol than usual for December, and they were caught napping. They recovered very quickly: the shortages were a thing of the past within a few days.
Not long after my time at SARS had ended, Mr Kieswetter moved on to the private sector. Talk was that he had been asked to replace Pravin Gordhan as Commissioner, but declined.
I was puzzled. Did Mr Kieswetter see it as a party-political appointment? He was known for impartiality — a civil servant before all else. I was left wondering. SARS was soon turned upside down in Zuma’s time, with bizarre stories of rogue units, all untrue. The Sunday Times was forced to publicly retract and apologise in print. I have no doubt that Mr K, a man with much more foresight than Western Cape petrol fat cats, foresaw the coming trouble.
His crystal ball was clearly in good order. Some years later, with J.Z. out of the picture, he returned as Commissioner. I was not surprised. Nobody who knew him could think of a better man for the job. Now 66 years old, and given his record in turning SARS around since the state capture years, nobody would be surprised if he took on another contract. He is a very young 66.
Yet, at least one podcaster has claimed that Mr K has declined such an offer. Maybe his crystal ball is working for him again, plus I am beset with the notion that the extra money he requested for AI tax collection strategies at budget time was thrust upon him, and that it was yet another cover for party funds. We will never know.
I would not want to be in the job with our poor looming prospects for tax collection. Or am I reading things that aren’t there? Mr K is a family man, and he earned a good and happy retirement. I am betting that, like me, he feels his greatest achievement is his family, and they will be the compass.
A taxing question
In the late 1960s, a Canadian colleague, Ray Romanik (I wonder where he is now), told me that every earner in Canada paid the same tax of $1k a year. Google has not confirmed this. It is arithmetically fair, but no unskilled worker will think it is fair to pay ten percent of his income when the ‘rich Jaspers’ are paying a hundredth of a percent of theirs.
Mr K, and revenue professionals everywhere, must ceaselessly debate the cost and fairness of collecting tax, among multiples of other considerations. If they don’t, who does? Google Gemini lists many entities that do, but not one of them includes individual taxpayers. Democratic involvement in tax does not get a mention. To paraphrase a popular phrase in movies:
Q: How did that work out for us, then?
A: Not well.
Democratic tax?
Personally, I tire of these debates. Nobody wants to crack their heads, or even be involved, and so it is left to bean counters. Duh. Across the world, nearly every country battles with the bitter, hard fact that the One Percent has snaffled our money. Meaning, tax systems generally fail. Now, I don’t mean that they fail to collect. Quite the opposite. It means simply that a centralised (read Federal) collection system can never be considered democratic. To rephrase that: Nobody votes FOR tax.
Not in any shape nor form do we vote for taxes, let alone increasing them. But most of us submit to paying them, because we are civilised, and want things that pooling money delivers: schools, roads, hospitals. Not arms. Does anybody (outside the US) vote for arms? Maybe Israel? It’s fair to say that tax is not, and probably never will be, democratic. If we survey a group of people in Diepsloot and a group in Sandton CBD, there is no way that either will vote for tax in the same style, or amount, or even vote for tax at all.
The cost of collecting tax
This criterion tops the debate. I think this is a great pity, because it is concerned only with quantity: cheaper is simply better. I don’t agree. Cheaper is simply nastier. The better debate is about a ratio: how much to give against how much to get. That way, in tax terms, we begin to approach the notion of quality.
In SA, collecting tax costs 0.7c per rand, less than one cent per rand. I don’t see protest marches about that, so can we assume that we are happy with it? It sounds pretty cheap, but it’s a whole different debate against what we get for what we pay, per rand.
Tax reminds me of the pleasant patter of a Nationwide airline captain as we soared over the Drakensberg 20 minutes after leaving Durban: ‘Life is what you make it. And if you don’t make it, that’s life.’
FEATURED IMAGE: Mr Edward Kieswetter. Wikimedia Commons.
This is an edited version of an article that first appeared on Jasper Cook’s website, AndThisIsJazz. Used with permission.
Great read, Jasper!