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Let them eat cake, is the message from the empty benches of parliament
MPs may soon be voting themselves a 15% pay increase for ordinary MPs and a 12% increase for cabinet ministers. This would bring the annual package for a rank and file MP to R239 642 and a minister would receive a package of R474 713. These figures obviously do not include all the freebies that go with the job such as the many international "fact finding" tours politicians feel obliged to organise for themselves on our behalf, generally to the world's more glamorous spots. Naturally it would also be quite unreasonable to expect an MP to make a long first-class flight to a hostile environment like New York without taking along at least one member of the family for company. It is also widely accepted that, because of the punishing workload, a politician's digestive system becomes very delicate with the result that the body can only absorb the finest wines and easily digested food like caviar and pâté de foie gras. How things have changed. Not so long ago I can remember Jay Naidoo standing up at one of those proletariat gatherings he used to love attending and telling the assembled masses that it was scandalous that anybody should earn more than R200 000 a year while the poor foraged around in the dirt looking for old chicken bones to gnaw on. Such traitorous enemies of the class struggle should immediately be slapped with a penal income tax rate to help them atone for their anti-social behaviour. Now poor old Jay is earning more than twice the offending amount, which is presumably why he has become so quiet of late. After all, it is rather difficult to confront the previously disadvantaged and still maintain your struggle credibility when your salary is pushing half-a-million a year. UNFORTUNATELY, the sensitive matter of a politician's remuneration invariably prompts snide comments about a government gravy train, particularly as public servants have been told there will have to be a freeze on pay rises because there isn't enough money to go round. Few people would argue that a competent cabinet minister should be paid a proper executive salary and a package of R474 713 is hardly excessive when compared with private sector packages. However, the fact that a handful of disinterested, layabout politicians will receive R239 642 just for the privilege of biding their time until 1999 is scandalous; particularly as some of them don't even bother to attend parliament. Rather than waste taxpayers' money for another two years, surely it would be better to kick the freeloaders out of parliament straight away and only remunerate those politicians who are actually doing any work.
The financial markets have a saying, "When America sneezes, we all catch cold", meaning that when US financial markets go into free fall, then other world markets are sure to follow because the US is the biggest kid on the block and what he says goes. The US's global influence extends way beyond financial markets, though, and what is hot in the US today will almost certainly be hot in SA tomorrow. The latest fad to hit the US's big cities is the cigar bar - which is quite extraordinary considering the recent settlement with the tobacco companies, who have had to stump up roughly $368-billion to compensate smokers who started puffing before the days of government health warnings and claim they never realised it was the cigarettes that were making them cough their lungs up every morning. Cigarette smoking is now banned in all public areas of New York, and wherever you look in Manhattan there are sullen little huddles of cigarette smokers who have been banished from office blocks to satisfy their craving on the sidewalk where they pose no threat to delicate air-conditioning systems and where healthy, non-smoking citizens can look at these pitiful, addicted creatures with disdain and loathing. Meanwhile, I am delighted to say, cigar smokers seem to have avoided the unwelcome attentions of the health fascists and are subject to none of the opprobrium suffered by their downmarket fellow puffers. Thanks to the existence of cigar bars, they can spend a pleasant few hours in a haze of blue smoke while attractive waitresses bring them well-mixed Martinis. Now that the SA government has slavishly followed the US's persecution of smokers, maybe somebody will have the courage to start the first local cigar bar.
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