Making his last speech in the National Assembly before giving up his seat and retiring to become a mere citizen after 20 years of parliamentary political life, former leader of the Democratic Alliance Tony Leon complained that there is an unsustainable situation in the country in which 25% of the population receives a welfare payment, but only about 10% pays personal income tax.
”Unless we reverse those ratios and start to create real jobs in the formal economy, we will find ourselves in a fiscally unstable and socially dangerous situation,” he said. ”And we must create those jobs in the worst global economic circumstances since the 1970s and perhaps since the Great Depression.”
Speaking in the debate on the president’s State of the Nation address on Monday, Leon said that the rule of former president Thabo Mbeki was a decade of lost opportunity.
”We failed to attract the high levels of foreign investment that we needed to grow our economy at a rate that could roll back unemployment,” he said. ”We created laws and regulations that shut down job creation and chased skills out of key government departments. In so doing we created a serious crisis in health, education and energy, hurting those in greatest need.”
He said the country needs to admit the truth: that we spent more than we earned; that we imported more than we exported; and that we have borrowed to make up the difference.
Leon pointed out that among the many failing sectors of state, the South African Revenue Service (Sars) shines as a beacon of excellence. ”You will recall that early on in the first Parliament, we removed Sars from the public service and let it employ its own staff, outside restrictions that apply elsewhere in government,” he said. ”We sacrificed service delivery, but not tax revenue.” — I-Net Bridge