Dog Tax And Repentant Mayors
Thulaganyo Jankie | Monday February 15, 2021 15:11
The Mayor became an instant target of Facebook rants and everyone queued to stick their knives in.
With the Mayor all bloodied and looking like he had just survived an encounter with a pit-bull, a plan to pacify the furious masses had to be whipped up. Somehow money had to be found somewhere.
And obviously not from Dr Matsheka’s distressed coffers.
The Mayor was busier than a one-armed Baghdad bricklayer. However, the Mayor is the quintessential GC guy.
When the going gets tough and the game is on the line, we GCians have an amazing ability to suck in our guts and tighten our chin straps. This is what the Mayor did. His 4-digit IQ got to work.
With the city teetering on the brink of all sorts of collapse there surely cannot be time to laze around enjoying a sitting allowance. The problems yanked the Mayor off the customary civic leader reverie with such terrifying fury. Perhaps taking a cue from the budget speech, where all sorts of taxes had been conjured up, the Mayor quickly got on the tax wagon.
The budget speech had proposed Sugar Tax, Car Imports tax, Big Belly Tax, Obesity Tax, Silly-Spouse Tax, Tax For People With Yellow Dresses, Tax for People Who Didn’t Do the Sporty Challenge and so on.
The Mayor followed suit. There was going to be a Dog Tax. Yes, we now have to pay to own a dog. It didn’t even matter
I looked sadly at my dogs - champion freeloaders that can only bark when the next door mongrels start barking. Even at that they seem to be etc’ng the bark. Lazy mongrels! Now I have to pay tax for them thanks to the hard-working, creative, national budget-excluded and money-seeking civic leaders.
More than half of the city population who own dogs don’t even know what breed their dogs are because they are usually a cross between 43 dog breeds and they have no name in the dog kingdom.
What do you call a dog that is 23% pitbull, 17% German Shepherd, 14% bull terrier, 9% boerboel, 11% Jack Russell, 3% Rhodesian Ridgeback?
These dogs are usually called names like Tiger, Lion, Wolf etc- names that are more vicious than the dogs themselves.
If it gets lost and the owner somehow puts up a poster on bulletin boards, it would not be ‘Dalmatian lost in Block 8, answers to the name Butch’ but rather something like ‘Tiger Lost in Ledumadumane’ – something which might cause public panic.
A lesson to all dog owners to work on the dog’s names especially mongrel owners. However, the Mayor seems a deeply religious man and repentance seems to feature heavily in his artillery.
Within a few days, before the week was over and as people spewed bile that could fill up Gaborone West potholes the mayor backtracked like a pugilist being pummelled by the legendary Mike Tyson. The Dog Tax was revoked. Cancelled!
The eminent man had realised his mistake. He was very sorry. Sorry is a very difficult word to say. And the difficulty is more exacerbated when you are the number one citizen of the city. Some say his hand was forced.
We did not care. Bottom line we won’t be paying tax for dogs called Smach, Hunter, Baswabile, Phuramotho, Bamphabampona, and all their types! Long live the Mayor.
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