South Africa doesn’t have too few tax laws, it has too few thriving taxpayers. When small businesses are pushed into full compliance before they are profitable, and when access to finance remains tighter than access to regulation, we are not building a broader tax base, we are narrowing it. Budget 2026 must decide: will it tax survival, or enable scale?

We’ve forgotten a powerful truth: in South Africa, only Parliament, not Treasury, not SARS, has the constitutional authority to impose taxes. Yet our representatives are playing catch-up while the state calls the fiscal shots. In this article we look at how taxation has drifted from democratic choice to bureaucratic default, and why it’s time to restore taxpayers as sovereigns, not subjects.