Finance minister Tito Mboweni gets it, but mineral & energy resources minister Gwede Mantashe doesn’t. Reserve Bank governor Lesetja Kganyago is well aware of the problem, but it seems to have entirely escaped health minister Zweli Mkhize and many others in the ruling ANC.

Figures from the SA Revenue Service (Sars), released before Christmas, reveal just how frighteningly fragile the corporate sector really is, with dire implications for SA’s fiscal sustainability. Don’t let the stiflingly dull title fool you: Sars’s 2019 "Tax Statistics" is one of the more terrifying documents you’ll read.

It reveals how lopsided the economy really is, reliant on a sliver of individuals to keep everything running. Scarily, this is true for both personal income tax (38.5% of the government’s income) and company income tax (16.6%).

Take company taxes. By March 2018, there were 3.2-million companies registered to pay tax in SA, of which 814,151 were recently assessed.

But Sars says that of those companies, "24.3% had positive taxable income, while 48.3% had taxable income equal to zero and the remaining 27.4% reported an assessed loss". In other words, only about one in four SA companies were reporting enough profit to contribute to the fiscus.

Sars elaborates: "The decline can largely be attributed to sluggish economic growth, structural challenges in some sectors of the economy, low confidence levels and political uncertainty. All of these factors play a role in subdued investment activity, resulting in lower profitability."

Since those figures were compiled, it has got worse. Lest we need reminding, GDP growth shrank by 0.6% in the third quarter of last year — and that was before stage 6 load-shedding.

It’s not just how weak companies are that’s a problem; it’s also that there are so few contributing. The fact is, just 380 large companies paid 57.2% of all corporate income tax last year.