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In the year 2030, the great leader was looking forward to the day when he would have spent a full 22 years in office. He had a partiality for the number and he felt 22 was a good figure for a period in power; and it did not really matter whether it was months or years. Since attaining office, he had delivered most of his promises – even though not necessarily in the way stupid people understood them when they were made. The country had become the promised land. There was no waste and no inefficiencies. Projects cost exactly the sum that had been estimated beforehand. All works were executed without blemishes and defects, with no contractor making any claims for extra works. No non-governmental organization, no single citizen could find anything to criticize in anything the government did, because after plans to hold consultation meetings to draw up plans, the net result were solutions that satisfied everyone. All consultants and public service employees carried out their duties scrupulously without fear or favour. For the first time in the history of the world and of humanity, there was a country where corruption had been completely eliminated at all levels. However, there was one promise the great leader had not yet managed to deliver and the fifth successive leader of the opposition in twenty years had continually harped on this point; there being no other point to belabour. This was the promise that VAT on all educational services was to be abolished. According to this promise, no VAT was to be levied on pencils and pens, school uniforms and track suits, computers, books, copybooks, dictionaries, periodicals and even the papers on which written examinations were... er... written. In the beginning it was thought that this was an easy task, until someone was caught filling up his income tax return using a ballpoint that had been bought by his son for educational purposes. An inquiry was set up and curious things turned up. People were using track-suits purchased as educational services for lazing about in front of television screens. Schoolchildren were using VAT-free pens and papers to write and send love letters to other schoolchildren. One woman – having a sylph-like figure – was reported as having been seen entering an erotic night club wearing a school uniform bought VAT-free. The proceedings of the enquiry were, of course, carried out in public and in front of television cameras. Suddenly, all over the country there was an uproar: everybody, it seemed, was preferring to use VAT-free pencils, pens, computers, track-suits, uniforms and whatever rather than the same items on which VAT had been levied. Those who had not thought out this before – apparently a small number of the great leader’s kitchen cabinet – began to do the same. In the circumstances, the great leader decided that VAT on educational goods and services was to be reinstated – temporarily – until a method could be found to prevent abuse. The media that had been bored stiff after so many years of idyllic perfection that could not be criticised in any way at all, finally found something worth reporting. Letters to the editors, previously containing just simple expressions of admiration and benign messages to other members of humankind, began to take a different turn. Somebody even composed a song on the promise that could not be kept! The hitherto silent opposition finally managed to find a chink in the great leader’s armour and a course in public speaking had to be devised for any opposition spokesperson that had remained in existence. The great leader came back, saying he had a plan.
He planned to see the results of the inquiry and meet all those interested and discuss how to draw up a plan so that the promise to remove VAT on pens, pencils and whatever is used for educational purposes could be delivered. And they thought and planned, planned and thought and even tried strategically planned thoughts as well as thoughtful strategic plans, but none seemed to do the trick... until someone found the perfect solution – and rushed to the great leader screaming ‘eureka’. All that had to be done was to insert a chip in the VAT free objects and make them smart! A smart pencil or a smart pen would stop working if it was being used for non-educational purposes. Smart computers would crash. Smart school uniforms and smart track-suits would immediately relate a message to the VAT office as soon as they were being used for purposes other than educational ones. The idea did the trick. Except for one particular activity: children doing their business. The great leader had already decided that using a potty is an educational service. Potty-training is an educational process and infants were being educated – he argued. Yet when children start the transition to toilets and start using toilet paper on their own, wasn’t this also part of an educational process? In the end, the great leader decreed that paper rolls in the children’s toilets at schools would be VAT-free but they would have a chip that would give out the sound of an ambulance siren as soon as the roll left the toilet. Toilets in schools would be firmly bolted to the ground (with an official seal) so that they would not be used inappropriately in places were toilets should be VAT-free. In carrying out this noble idea, someone boobed. School toilets were exempt not only from VAT but also from an eco-tax that was based on the ‘polluter pays’ principle, as both taxes were collected together in order to do away with inefficiencies. Somehow people discovered that it was cheaper to do their business in a school toilet than at home. Teachers, who were never known to be at school outside teaching hours, suddenly began to turn up an hour before school started and everybody was doing it at school. The school sewer systems could not cope and something had to be done. Why not use the smart chip idea as well, someone wrote in the letter pages of one daily. The idea was immediately taken up and every citizen of the country had to insert a smart chip in his or her buttock (liberally choosing between left and right) so that government could control the abuse of toilets that were VAT-free for educational purposes only. And that is why that year was henceforth called: The year of the smart ass.
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