The Chartered Institute for Business Accountants (CIBA) has launched a petition to reduce personal income tax in the upcoming budget speech. The petition will be presented to the Minister of Finance, Enoch Godongwana, and submitted to National Treasury. As part of the petition, people can send their tax tips to Treasury. To date the petition has acquired almost 25 000 signatures.   

CIBA CEO, Nicolaas van Wyk, says only 2,5 million South Africans pay 84% of all personal income tax, a huge burden for such a small part of the population to carry. “Our members are accountants for small and medium enterprises, they have first-hand experience of the hardships ever-increasing tax rates have on their clients and their businesses. We need to raise awareness with government about the burden our taxpayers carry before more taxpayers emigrate.” 

“Taxes are generated from economic activity. The country needs more quality economic activity to generate more tax. What we don’t need is a higher tax rate as that inevitably reduces economic activity” he says. Instead of raising taxes, government should focus on increasing economic activity to generate the tax they need, particularly in the tourism sector.  

“Several hundred thousand people are employed in the tourism sector,” says Van Wyk. “Pre-COVID we were getting about 14 million tourists visiting South Africa, spending money on buying things, staying over in tourist facilities and that creates employment. If we could double that number, 700 000 people could be employed in the sector. Plus, the money generated from that would plug the tax gap and government won’t need to increase people’s income tax.”   

Van Wyk says that France has about 70 million citizens and gets as many tourists visiting every year. “South Africa should strive for the same thing. We have 60 million people in SA, we’ve got an amazing country, we should invest more in tourism to attract millions more tourists,” he says.   

Van Wyk believes President Ramaphosa would be open to suggestions. “Government is going through a tough period now. There are huge Eskom debts and infrastructure spend that must happen. We want to introduce a National Health Insurance and we want to increase social upliftment spending – but that money has to come from somewhere. There is a realisation from government that we need to be a unified South Africa moving forward and therefore I think they’d be willing to listen,” he says.  

“We launched this petition because we want to make the point very strongly. We really think tourism is under-utilised. We keep hearing about Eskom and all the problems, but we should rather focus on growth and then the rest will fall into place,” says Van Wyk.  

Click on this  link to sign the petition before the budget speech on 22 February 2023 and let the minister know that you can’t pay more tax.