Why angelic Manuel deftly avoids thorny issue of taxing lobola
February 27, 2007
 By Jabulani Sikhakhane
Angelic Trevor Manuel. Notice how the finance minister last week deftly avoided the issue of lobola and whether it should be taxed. He kicked the thorny question upstairs to the mythical elders.
In his budget speech, Manuel recounted that for two consecutive years he'd been sent suggestions on the tax treatment of lobola. Last year a taxpayer suggested that the government should make lobola tax deductible. This year he was asked to impose VAT on lobola or tax lobola trusts because some people were making money out of them. "These issues seem far too complex for me or my officials to handle. I'm going to consult our elders on this one," he said.
Manuel raised a related issue in his 2006 budget speech when he quoted Sipho Makola asking for dating expenditure to be made tax deductible. "It's really difficult lately to find a woman without first dating her and such expenditure is sometimes beyond our budgets. We either date or forever remain bachelors," Makola said.
The issues of lobola and dating taxes are controversial and Manuel was wise to sidestep them. But they are the tip of a much bigger iceberg: the role of the family in a nation's socioeconomic life.
Numerous economists and sociologists have done extensive research on the subject.
The pioneer of this work is Gary Becker, the University of Chicago economist and 1992 Nobel prize winner, who extended economic analysis to new areas of human behaviour and relations, including the role of the family.
In his book Human Capital, Becker sets out the large influence that parents have on the knowledge, skills, values and habits of their children.
"Large differences among young children grow over time with age and schooling because children learn more easily when they are better prepared. Therefore, even small differences among children in the preparation provided by their families are frequently multiplied over time into large differences when they are teenagers. This is why the labour market cannot do much for school dropouts who can hardly read and never developed good work habits, and why it is so difficult to devise policies to help these groups," Becker says.
Where the issue of families and their impact on socioeconomic life becomes controversial is over the structure of the family.
Numerous studies have found that children, on average, do better in married households than in any other family structures.
"Married adults, women as well as men, are happier, healthier and wealthier than their unmarried counterparts. And communities with higher marriage rates evidence fewer social pathologies, including crime, educational failure, and poverty, than do those with lower marriage rates," says Wade Horn, a child psychologist who now heads the US government's Administration for Children and Families.
That's not the full picture, though. Research by Sarah McLanahan and Gary Sandefur finds that "as much as half of the apparent disadvantage of growing up in a single-parent family is due to the lower incomes these families typically have", according to an article by Andrew Cherlin, a professor of public policy at Johns Hopkins University.
McLanahan is the director of the centre for research on child wellbeing and professor of sociology at Princeton University and Sandefur is a sociology professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
The controversy around family structures has become even more pronounced in the US following the Bush government's decision to insert the marriage agenda into its welfare programme.
Horn, who has employed the zeal of an ideologue and the discipline of an academic to inject marriage promotion into a host of government programmes under his purview, now runs more than 200 programmes seeking to change public attitudes surrounding marriage, persuade teenagers to aspire to matrimony and teach relationship skills to young couples, according to a Wall Street Journal article published last November.
Horn persuaded the US congress to insert his marriage agenda into the welfare programme and to commit $500 million (R3.5 billion) over five years to the project, the journal reported.
Horn's programmes have drawn flak from feminists who argue that his emphasis on marriage unfairly demonises unwed mothers and pressures women to stay in sometimes unhealthy, violent relationships. Feminists - as in those who advocate women's rights and sexual equality - add that single-parent families can be just as good for children if they receive the support they need. They add that being a single parent may not be easy, but that it is a more viable alternative than in the past.
Women's groups say that women should be free to pursue this path and they see programmes such as Horn's as an attack on that freedom of choice.
Libertarians have also weighed in, albeit from a different angle. They argue that it is not the business of the government to promote one family structure over another.
"It's shown that married people are happier - so what does that mean for politics? Does it follow that we should be encouraging people to marry? Is that the realm of politics … or something that should be left to individual choice?" asks UK academic Paul Dolan in The Times of January 7.
How much the state should interfere in the personal lives of its citizens is a prickly issue.
Perhaps that's why angels like Manuel fear treading on the marriage grounds.
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