Taxageddon: The Slow, Painful Death of the South African Wallet

 

Let’s just get straight to it: South Africans are being taxed to death. Not the neat kind of death with a eulogy and some finger food. No, we’re talking about a slow, grinding, Kafkaesque financial asphyxiation where you wake up every year to a new reason the state has to mug you again, but this time with more paperwork.

It used to be simple. You worked, you paid income tax. Fair enough. Roads need building. Hospitals need funding. Someone has to keep Eskom’s lights off. But somewhere in the last three decades, the folks in charge had a eureka moment: Why not tax absolutely everything? And so, they did.

The Classic Rinse-and-Repeat

Let’s begin with VAT, that sneaky little 15% that’s tacked on to everything except bread and heartbreak. It used to be 14%. Then, with the subtlety of a falling grand piano, the government nudged it up to 15% and never looked back. It’s amazing how something so small can cause such national despair.

Then there’s personal income tax. For top earners, that number now dances dangerously close to 45%. You’d think this means South Africa has world-class infrastructure and spotless governance. Except it doesn’t. Potholes can now apply for citizenship. Loadshedding is a feature, not a bug. And don’t even ask where half the money goes. Auditor-General reports read like dystopian fiction.

The New Wave: Tax Everything that Breathes

But wait, why stop at taxing income and purchases? The modern South African government said, “Let’s get creative!”

• Carbon tax? Sure. Let’s charge companies more for existing and then pass the cost straight down to the consumer.
• Plastic bag levy? Every shopping trip now comes with a guilt-tax for carrying your groceries.
• Sugar tax? Your Coke is now a political statement.
• Fuel levies? At this point, more than a third of what you pay at the petrol pump goes straight to levies, fees, and the Treasury's mysterious black hole.
• Green paper on wealth tax? Oh yes, that’s been floated too, because God forbid you’ve saved or built anything.

And now, the latest proposal? A two-pot retirement system that’s meant to help but somehow results in more confusion and suspicion that someone’s just trying to get a foot in the door of your pension fund. Again.

Death by a Thousand Forms

What’s worse than the taxes themselves? The administration of them. Filing your returns now requires a PhD in statistical guesswork. SARS has gone digital - which is great - except it now means you get auto-assessed by a robot with no sense of irony. And heaven forbid you get something wrong. They’ll audit your grandchildren.

You’re taxed when you earn, taxed when you spend, taxed when you save, and taxed when you die. Even your tombstone could carry a value-added markup.

“For the People” – But Not Really

Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m all for contributing to the greater good. Build the roads. Fund the schools. Feed the hungry. Fix the hospitals. But in South Africa, what started as a system to support development has turned into a cash-guzzling, bureaucratic behemoth that takes more than it gives.

Where’s the accountability? Where’s the bang for our taxed buck? More and more, ordinary citizens are footing the bill for mismanagement, bloated civil service salaries, and endless bailouts of SOEs that couldn’t run a lemonade stand at a summer fête.

And if you zoom out just a little, you start to wonder, is this just incompetence, or something more calculated? There’s a creeping sense that this endless taxation, the erosion of private enterprise, and the quiet dismantling of the middle class could be part of a larger ideological play: Strip people of their financial independence, make them dependent on state handouts, and suddenly you’ve got the perfect conditions for a state-controlled society dressed in democratic clothing.

Call it socialism, call it a soft-serve communism, either way, the direction is unmistakable: weaken the individual, strengthen the state, and before you know it, we’ll be queuing for bread under a mural of smiling politicians.

Conclusion: Enough Already

The average South African is expected to work, save, raise a family, pay for private healthcare, private security, and private education, and then still hand over half their income to a government that can’t keep the lights on.

It’s madness. Utter madness. And it’s driving the middle class either offshore or into financial survival mode. We’re running out of things to tax. And soon, they’ll start taxing our frustration levels too. “Oh, you’re angry? That’s a 7% emotional levy.”

At some point, we have to ask: are we citizens or walking ATMs?

So, here’s a thought: cut the waste, fire the freeloaders, fix the mess. Then maybe, just maybe, we’ll stop needing a tax on everything short of breathing.