Increasingly, the average salary earner in this country struggles to make ends meet – and it is becoming tougher every year.
In fact, in general terms, those who are not politically connected or do not belong to unions to arm-wrestle a 10-12% increase by dancing, looting or burning things in the streets, are becoming poorer with each passing year.
By and large, employers stick to the inflation-based principle when it comes to annual increases, which have fluctuated around the 5% mark in recent years, while the overall cost of living runs considerably higher.
The collective fuel price increases over the past few years, ditto your supermarket trolley of essential foodstuffs, spiraling electricity bills and property rates, serve as some examples where inflation rates have no bearing.
It is simply a matter of gritting your teeth and following the old Afrikaans adage of ‘k*k of betaal is die wet van Transvaal’.
The plight of the multitudes of unemployed is, of course, beyond description.
What is becoming progressively reprehensible to the masses of ordinary citizens eking out an honest living on modest earnings – or surviving with nothing at all – is the seemingly ongoing and unrestrained wastage of public money in all spheres of government and its parastatals.
Fat cat salaries for incompetence and corrupt practices to enrich those already earning exorbitant salaries still abound, funded largely by the middle and lower classes.
The kind of salaries those in power allocate themselves is mind-boggling to the man in the street.
Let’s look local
Mtubatuba Municipality is one of five municipalities in the province under administration – meaning the responsible officials appointed to look after the public’s interest in their respective constituencies have failed. To be more blunt, their incompetencies have turned the municipalities into dysfunctional entities.
These Municipal Managers are, confirmed COGTA MEC Nomusa Dube-Ncube, rewarded for ruining their towns with R1-million annual salary packages.
But that’s not all, while the province sent in their administrators to try and sort out the mess, the Municipal Managers are retained in their posts.
There is also the little matter of the public funding the administrators’ salaries of R135 000 PER MONTH.
This has been going on at Mtuba, a month shy of two years. Do the maths.
This is but a small drop in the ocean of wholesale gluttony of fund-raiding throughout the land by the few at the helm.
I rest my case with author and philosopher Ayn Rand’s comment in 1957:
‘When you see trading is done, not by consent, but by compulsion; when you see that in order to produce you need permission from men who produce nothing; when you see money flowing to those who deal, not in goods, but in favours; when you see that men get richer by graft and pull than by work, and your laws don’t protect you against them, but protect them against you; when you see corruption being rewarded and honesty becoming a self-sacrifice, you may know that your society is doomed’.
