PAN Africanist Congress President Dr Stanley Mogoba says a poverty eradication tax is critical for all South Africans to be comfortable, calling poverty a time bomb which “might blow up in our faces sooner rather than later.”
In his opening address at the party’s annual conference at Vista University in Bloemfontein, he said urged the wealthy to heed the PAC’s call to allow everyone to ?enjoy the bare necessities of this life in our so-called rich country.?
“The rich who ignore the poor and take them as part of their landscape may in fact be the ones who are hit hardest,” he said. “They should wake up, and make some little sacrifice – like paying a poverty eradication tax or an employment tax or a water tax.”
On Aids, Mogoba said President Thabo Mbeki’s grand economic plan would fail if HIV/Aids was not handled properly and taken more seriously.
“We must throw in every piece of gold, silver, platinum, etc, and invest it in Aids research.
“We must get our priorities right. To become an atomic power, to fly to the moon and outer space, to travel in luxury cars and aeroplanes, live in houses worth half a million… is perhaps tolerable for a normal country, but most obscene and revolting for a world facing a pandemic like Aids.
Mogoba repeated his call for an urgent summit as the only sensible and rational way to resolve the country’s land problem, saying the PAC joined the people of Zimbabwe, Namibia, Kenya and others in demanding “a fair and legitimate share of our land”.
The PAC realised and acknowledged that to correct or adjust land dispossession was not an easy matter.
“Either we have to return to the battlefield and fight for land or we have to engage one another seriously in talks. We have stated very clearly that we prefer to talk, and therefore we reiterate our call for an indaba on land. This, in our view, is the only sensible and rational way of resolving this historic problem,” he said.
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