When they need to educate us, they do things the roundabout way and make us fish our textbooks out of rivers. But come the time for them to take money from us, they'll offer glasses of champagne and have someone hold our selections while we browse.
Government makes the process of citizens giving money to them the easiest thing ever. Technology, efficiency and capabilities at the SA Revenue Service (SARS) far exceed that of any government department.
This is because our government isn't as silly as it would like us to believe. They feign incompetence when it comes to service delivery, yet become Einsteins when it's their turn to collect.
Go to Home Affairs and usually, no matter what you're there for, you'll never walk out in under an hour. The sloth movement of employees makes you feel as though you're in a dream-like state. Everything drags and hours and hours pass.
However, try and file your tax return and government will engage its ninja skills to make it all happen in a flash.
You'll get thrown at you an eFiling option, a mobi site, an iPad app, a synced contact centre solution and a how-to YouTube service. Choose your weapon.
Why is it we have a magnitude of options on how to give government money, yet when you need something from it, like silly identity documents, there is no method apart from the old “queue and wait”?
No delusions
It's not just citizens wanting to make record of their existence through ID books that proves a painful and drawn-out experience; try getting a driver's licence or an education for that matter.
There are too many things government should be doing and that it talks about doing that gets delayed for decades before anything happens. To name a few, Aarto, which will help improve road safety, broadband roll-out, smart ID cards (which were supposed to be piloted in 2008), a national emergency number, and I honestly could just go on here.
Why would government make our lives easier or want to make us feel like anything other than a big fat cash cow?
Farzana Rasool, IT in government editor, ITWeb
If every government department worked as efficiently as SARS, what a smart, informed, safe, satisfied nation we would have.
But why would they do that? Why would government make our lives easier or want to make us feel like anything other than a big fat cash cow? No, our government doesn't believe in delusions.
A little respect
Every good business knows you can't put all your investment in good debt collection if you want to be successful. You need to have efficient customer service and service delivery and a good reputation as well.
If we respected our government more, maybe we wouldn't mind paying hefty taxes or standing in long queues.
But how can we when they allow large batches of much needed textbooks to fall into rivers, and millions of rands to land in their pockets?
They live out fantasies of being Michael Schumacher (or at least being driven by him) and build up stunning traffic fines. Several national Cabinet ministers have racked up fines in excess of R30 000 between April 2009 and March 2012. Minister of mineral resources Susan Shabangu is in the lead, with R64 060; then there's the minister of energy, Dipuo Peters, with R39 400; and in third place justice minister Jeff Radebe, with R34 600.
The total tally of fines for national ministers, according to the Democratic Alliance, now stands at R207 740 and 16 ministers are yet to reply to queries about their fines.
Add to that list R11 000 worth of manicures and pedicures and R5.8 million in “lost” (as in grew legs and walked away) IT equipment and furniture at the Presidency alone.
So, they clearly don't seem to want our respect, and we'll scream and shout about the injustice of it all, but eventually quietly decide between the mobi site and the iPad app when filing our tax returns. Moo.
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