SA now has more AIDS+TB-patients than taxpayers!

I saw this on another blog and saw the gravity of the situation consideing that COSATU still thinks that capitalism is the enemy. The enemy is within. It is called ignorance!

Check the statistics: 52-million people (8-m with AIDS+TB); supported by only 7.7-million taxpayers…

May 17 2008 - Cape Town. South Africa has 47-million citizens plus at least 5-million dirt-poor economic refugees from the rest of Africa.

Yet the country only has 7.7-million officially-registered taxpayers says labour minister Membathisi Mdladlana, who added during this week’s parliamentary debate that although 13-million people do have jobs, 5.8-million of them are merely part-time workers whose wages are not contributing to the central tax registers.

In other words, only 7.7 million people are paying income-taxes to the central government to support the infrastructure for 52-million people who are becoming seriously compromised by the AIDS+TB epidemics, unemployment and growing famine: more than 8-million working-age people are also infected with AIDS+TB and thus totally unemployable; 5-million more are hunger-refugees from the rest of Africa; and some 23-m indigenous South Africans of all races now somehow still survive below the breadline of $1 a day according to the UN.

The education department (i.e. funded by those 7.7-million taxpayers) now feeds some 6-million South African school-children to stop them from starving to death. More than half are AIDS-orphans living with grandmoms on pensions, the rest live on handouts.

The countryside around all the major cities are now surrounded by massive filth-, disease- and crime-ridden shantytowns where thousands of increasingly organised feral youth gangs with AK-47s rule the streets, pretty much 24/7 now.

This lopsided system simply cannot last - especially because the ANC-government officials themselves are looting the treasury enmasse: these ‘black diamonds’ are lavishly wasting the country’s tax-money on utterly mindless luxuries while the country’s border-to-border municipal infrastructures, the entire transportation and health-care systems are collapsing from criminal waste, fraud and neglect.

These latest, and truly shocking tax-statistics were cited by SA labour minister Membathisi Mdladlana in a parliamentary debate in which he warned the country’s top-listed companies — i.e. those very guys generating those taxes paid in by 7,7-million people — that they would be severely punished if they didn’t start hiring all those many ‘qualified blacks out there’ at once.

The fact that the working-age population pool has been allowed to become criminally infected with AIDS+TB only due to the criminal neglect of the country’s denialist-president Thabo Mbeki seems to have escaped his notice. The defence force union this week added to this volatile mix by obtaining a High Court order through which the SA military must keep its 12,650 AIDS-infected staffers on its payroll - and moreover also have to hire new HIV+ applicants.

In other words, South Africa’s entire defence force already has become a countrywide hospice for AIDS-infected working age men and women - and undoubtedly this court order will now also be used as a new weapon against any JSE-listed companies which still dare to turn down HIV-infected job applicants in future. And if this applies to HIV+, the court order could be interpreted to also include other infectious diseases such as TB…

Foreign investors will undoubtedly be taking an even closer look at any JSE-company which now also is burdened with this new sword of Democles hanging over their heads.

Clearly, just as has just been done to the (taxpayer-funded) military, all these JSE-listed companies now will also be forced to become hospices for AIDS-infected employees and job-applicants: these companies will not only be forced to start hiring HIV-infected applicants, but will also be forced to pay for:
- the employees’ increasing absences as the deadly infection progresses;
- pay for their huge medical bills to keep them on antiretroviral treatments as long as possible;
- pay all the funeral costs and
- the widows-and-orphans benefits in perpetuity.

Don’t know too many investors who’d be willing to back a company with the odds stacked so heavily against them.

http://www.themercury.co.za/index.php?fArticleId=4404

South Africa Gone Wrong

http://www.thetimes.co.za/News/Article.aspx?id=768289