ON THE WATER
NEELS BLOM: The time to crush the head of the snake is now, or be squashed
‘We have been ripped off, lied to and made to endure president Jacob Zuma’s unspeakable taste in friends’
Behold the python (or the ANC government, whichever occurs plausibly): for the longest time, herpetologists maintained that pythons killed their prey by suffocation. A python would bite its victim to establish an anchor and coil its body around that of the victim to suffocate it by incrementally tightening its coils at each exhalation by the prey until an excess of carbon dioxide and a privation of oxygen kills it.
Serial stranglers are well aware of its virtues, including the intimacy that the necessity of proximity to its victim affords the killer. Alas, this is true no longer. The Pythonidae, one Scott M Boback (PhD) and his gizmo-heavy propeller heads discovered as recently as 2015, kill quickly and elegantly by squashing the bejesus out of their prey so that venous back pressure exceeds the heart’s capacity, et voila, lunch is served.
But this doesn’t mean all the serpents in our world have got the memo. Some still swear by the death-by-increment method of predation. Take the Cabinet, which approved a white paper earlier in 2017 that would compel citizens who plan to be out of the country for longer than three months to register with home affairs. Think of it as a coil tightening around your ribcage just as you exhaled with the knowledge that you have a postgraduate qualification and a potential sponsor elsewhere in the world in a more reasonable tax regime. By taking names in the departure lounge at ORT International, it could be a matter of minutes only before the South African Revenue Service, if it sees the Treasury’s draft tax law amendments into law, lays claim to your tax advantage on income earned abroad. The injustice of this scheme is that the Treasury intends to tax citizens even though they derive no benefits from the tax thus levied. Think of this as another rib-crushing coil tightening on your walle...
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