(Parliamentary debate: Budget Amendment Bill)

The ANC government must take note of taxpayers' serious resentment toward paying for non-existing service delivery while watching as their hard-earned money is distributed among corrupt and incompetent authorities who do nothing but squander and steal it.

Amid the biggest economic crisis in the history of South Africa, we sit with a poor government where mismanagement, incompetence and corruption are at the order of the day. The amended budget offers no light at the end of this dark tunnel, instead it creates an even greater dependence on the state.

The ANC government is getting more and more out of touch with the economic reality in South Africa.

While a great responsibility rests on the shoulders of taxpayers to pay for government projects, the people are starting to question whether it still makes any sense to do so.

And yet taxes are levied and aggressively collected, including municipal rates and taxes, just to be distributed among corrupt officials. Tax payers' resistance to this injustice is busy growing.

Why should people pay for garbage disposal if there is no such service being delivered? Why pay for services that do not exist while rates and taxes keep increasing at a steady pace?

The government needs to realise that the public will not keep funding the ANC's corruption and mismanagement indefinitely.

Even in the country's greatest time of crisis – with the Covid-19 pandemic – government funds are still being looted, which hampers the fight against the disease. Money was, for example, stolen from the Unemployment Insurance Fund (UIF).

At the Oliver Tambo District Municipality, R4 million was paid for a four-day door-to-door awareness campaign while the Municipality has no service delivery and the hospital cannot treat Covid-19 patients.

Why pay tax if the sick do not receive medical treatment? Why pay tax if there is no service delivery and people on farms are left unprotected? The government has failed and this budget serves as proof.

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