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ECONOMY AND RIGHT TO DIGNITY

13/12/2018 02:53:00 By vusi Kunene

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I want to congratulate government for making sure that despite the economic crisis, the elderly are paid their grants. It’s always good to see government prioritise the needs of the people.

I felt so good that as we celebrated Human Rights Day, government was at least allowing senior citizens of this country a chance to enjoy the holidays with dignity. Little as it may be but they will buy something and the holidays will not be all gloom.

However, there is still a long way to go before it can help most of its citizens. A lot, including changing some policies and legislation, needs to be done before people enjoy their right to dignity. The dignity of the people of this country is violated when they have to jump over the borderline to work as slaves in neighbouring countries. A question that comes to mind is why do people have to go to neighbouring countries to be slaves?

However, the answer is there for all to see. People need employment, which our country is failing to provide. Without a source of income one cannot be said to be living a dignified life. It is the duty of our leaders to ensure that citizens of this country have employment opportunities. Government should, therefore, make means that will make investors come to the country and open businesses. Yes, currently there are moves to do this but they are not yielding positive results. Is this not because some of our laws and policies are turning them away?

There are a lot of moves to have people of this country start their own projects but again these moves are not yielding any positive results and that leads to more indignity to those people who attended workshops only to come back and fail to implement what they learned. It then becomes a waste of resources because we see people being trained at high costs and then they do not implement what they learned. This again needs government to provide the people with an opportunity to exercise the skills they have learned.

It is a known fact that when these people are taken for training they are from poor backgrounds and therefore do not have capital to start whatever project they would have been taught. It is incumbent upon government to provide them with capital. Government can then recover its money after the people have started production and will even tax the profits from their projects.

I was pleased when I read that the NAMBoard finally came to its senses and lifted the ban on importing mealie-meal from our neighbours. The country is not in a position to provide enough for our domestic consumption and the ban was going to destroy a lot of emaSwati. But this is an opportunity if we can utilise it properly.

We are importing mealie-meal at cheap prices from our neighbours because they are producing maize at a large scale. We have people as a market but as a country we are failing to invest enough to satisfy our market. If the ban was brought about because farmers were producing enough for the country’s consumption it would have made sense. We have the natural resources to produce enough maize but government is failing to utilise that opportunity. Such projects would avail employment opportunities to the people of this country and, therefore, they would not suffer the indignity of going to be slaves in foreign countries. Again government would make money from taxing the workers and at the same time tax the profits of the projects.
I want to applaud the minister of ICT for speaking against the over-taxation of people of this country, including the business community.
We have been crying over this for some time but no one was listening. But it is never too late minister and we are happy even though we are still sceptical that maybe it is just window dressing. Speaking of taxes made me think of the amount of money that government would get if the number of people working was to increase tremendously. This can happen if all those working were to be paid what is above the minimum wage so that it could be taxed.
That means that people should not only be made to work and get an undignified salary because that works against their right to dignity. The people have to get a salary that will make them at least meet their basic needs. If we have very low salaries, then people will just jump the border to neighbouring countries. This also should be applied to elderly grants. The elderly will continuously find ways of going to our neighbours because they know that they will be paid much better than in the kingdom.