Building walls to protect our new, betterer South Africa…

So the 17-million South Africans who are reliant on State grants (pensioners, child grants, disability grants etc.) may not get their money on April 1.
No, this is not a sick April Fool’s joke it is a stark reality as the Government dilly-dallies in extending the R13-billion contract with CPS who ensure that the 17-million get between them R12-billion of grants every month.
Now cynics say that failure to pay the grantees may force those who, but are not willing, into some kind of action to seek work or even become entrepreneurs like the Pakistanis, Malawians and many others who we are currently trying to kick-out of the country.
The cynics – and there are many who are even more cynical now that Uncle Pravin has enforced a 45% tax rate on those earning R1,5-million plus per annum – believe that South Africans are quite comfortable when it comes to sitting back and letting foreigners run tuck shops where they can buy bread and cellphone shops where they can use their SASSA money to buy air time and cellphone fun and even swipe their SASSA card at the nearest liquor store.
South Africans are not quite so hot when it comes to showing entrepreneurial enterprise despite attempts by the municipality to host ‘business development road-shows’ (whatever that means) at the Oval.
If you really want to get people talking about how to be entrepreneurial, invite a couple of Malawians (stats show that there are more Malawians in South Africa than in Malawi and we are not talking about Madonna’s adopted accessories either), some Zimbabweans, Pakistanis, Congolese or any other nationality representative currently trawling the dirty pavements and shops of downtown and upper town Dundee in a bid to make a living.
They will probably regale you with tales of how they made a getaway from their homelands, avoiding bullets, United Nations famine queues, Angelina Jolie, Madonna and a myriad of other prejudices on their way to the new, better, improved super-human rights considerate South Africa. So Donald wants to build a wall to keep them out, while here we just beat them up and then go around criticising Donald for being racist. As we used to say up north, ‘there is nowt stranger than folk’.