Johannesburg: Tax Justice SA’s (TJSA) Yusuf Abramjee says South Africa is currently at a tipping point.
The civil society organisation has delivered a warning that organised crime gangs are looting our nation and threatening the future of every South African.
"Our deepening electricity crisis is due to high-level corruption and criminal cartels that have been looting our vital power-generating network worth billions of rand," said Abramjee.
He indicated that organised crime kingpins spearheading an unprecedented growth in illicit trade have captured other key sectors of our economy.
"They’re stealing more than R100 billion annually from the state purse by selling smuggled, counterfeit and other tax-evading goods."
"As a direct result, honest, hard-working South Africans are being deprived of the essential services that those taxes are meant to buy," added Abramjee.
Abramjee says the R100bn stolen from South Africa every year could pay for vital priorities for the nation, including a basic income grant for half of the population, free housing for 5 million desperate citizens every year, and solar systems that would take 100 small towns annually off the Eskom grid for ever.
"Instead, transnational organised crime gangs are using this ill-gotten wealth to build lives of luxury and to fund their other deeply destructive enterprises like prostitution, human trafficking and even terrorism," says Abramjee.
He said South Africans were fed-up with living in a country where crime was allowed to pay. Illicit trade was the real state of our nation.
"Our leaders can afford to tolerate it no longer," said Abramjee.
The Star