South Africans don’t mind paying tax – we mind how it’s spent
The unprecedented postponement of the government’s proposed 2025 budget was more than just a bureaucratic delay—it was a wake-up call. Among the reported causes for the stillborn budget proposals were disagreements in the Government of National Unity over a significant tax reform measure: increasing VAT to 17% from the last hike to 15% implemented in 2018.
Commentators have characterised the proposed VAT hike as regressive, arguing that it would overwhelmingly burden poor and working class people while letting South Africa’s wealthiest individuals and large corporations off the hook from paying their fair share. Understanding public attitudes and the conditions for social assent is crucial in the process of shaping public policy, and if anything was to be learned from the riots that erupted in Kenya last year, this is especially true for taxation.
In 2024, the Money Talks: Tax research initiative undertook to establish how people across seven countries—namely South Africa, Kenya, Brazil, the UK, USA, France, and Germany—understood tax policies in their countries and how they felt about them. Using a combination of surveys and focus groups with a diverse and representative sample of each population, the initiative shed light on how ordinary citizens view taxation, fairness, and government accountability in the management of tax funds.
In the local leg of the study, 65% of South Africans reported feeling overtaxed. As could be expected, the cost of living weighs heavily on the lives of South Africans, with 77% reporting that not enough was being spent on social policy measures that would mitigate this burden— the efficient and effective delivery of public goods and services.
The polling revealed that the majority of South Africans understand and support the value proposition of taxation, expressing that we are willing to pay the same (38%) or more (30%) in taxes if the government would raise expenditure on social goods and services that qualitatively improve our lives. These numbers shifted only marginally when disaggregated by ethnicity, age, income group, educational attainment and even past vote, further reinforcing a pro-tax and pro-social expenditure orientation on the part of most South Africans.
By contrast, 27% of South Africans are adamant about their desire to see a reduction in tax and social expenditure—that is, that the social safety net should not be the taxpayer’s problem—while 5% just didn’t know what they would prefer.
Looking at the data, it is difficult to shake off the feeling that South Africans are concerned that the tax system is rigged to favour ultra- rich individuals and powerful multinational corporations, and frustrated by corruption and inefficiency draining limited public resources away from desperately needed social expenditure.
For example, 58% of people in South Africa support a wealth tax, whereas 13% explicitly do not. When asked who should pay this ‘wealth tax’, however, there is strong support for “billionaires” (46%) and the ‘super-rich’ (32%) across the board, suggesting that net-support for wealth taxation may very well be higher insofar as the messaging around it is specific about targeting the ultra-rich billionaire class. This inference is validated by the overwhelming support (80%) for a messaging treatment which proposed imposing a 2% wealth tax on the richest 3000 individuals in South Africa. These numbers seem to say that although South Africans don’t necessarily have a shared idea of what it means to be wealthy, we certainly agree on what it means to be very rich.
On corporate taxation, South Africans are strongly aligned, with 72% of people in South Africa support corporate tax—in contrast to only 8% who oppose it. When asked what improvements corporate taxes could make to life in South Africa, 56% of people felt that this tax revenue would improve public services and 43% felt it would go to improve inequality in the country. That is only if this tax revenue is managed properly. These responses do not only reflect what South Africans are most concerned about—creeping financial precarity and the catastrophic impact of widening inequality on our quality of life—but what we hope our tax Rands and cents should be doing, which is to keep them at bay.
If anyone is listening intently to what South Africans are saying (and how they are polling) the indication is that our frustration is not just about how much we are being taxed—which is too much—but also about who isn’t and why.
Currently, the perception is that ordinary people are being forced to shoulder the burden, while the super-rich and multinational corporations dodge or receive special protection from paying their fair share. And this seems a betrayal of the expectations the government raised, last year, when the minister of finance joined an open letter with his counterparts from Brazil, Germany and Spain calling for a global tax on billionaires, and the president signed the Global Minimum Tax Act into law, on Christmas eve that same year.
These and further insights from the Money Talks: Tax study present compelling insights about the position of ordinary South Africans which should weigh heavily on law and policymakers as they negotiate filling the budget gap—not just between themselves, but with society. Ordinary South Africans are clamouring for real solutions to drive the economic growth that will scale employment and development, but they are not convinced that being taxed into oblivion amidst the escalating cost of living crisis will yield the touted results.
Phamodi and Khaas write from the New Economy Hub, which is a coordinating partner of the Money Talks research initiative.