Wasteful and irregular expenditure has become commonplace in SA. The amounts across departments are enough to cause a major tax revolt. Alas we do nothing. When the minister of finance announced that about R100bn more will be raised from taxes, the already over-taxed middle classes, so distressed at having to juggle the balls of mortgage, education, food, health-care and security in the air, despair. Squeezing the last drops of money from the taxpayer is completely unjustified given the levels of corruption. Preparing myself for a radio interview on Tuesday, I scanned the Internet and was shocked at the extent of the corruption in this country.
In 2013 R12bn of the Gauteng Health Department's budget could not be accounted for. According to the Auditor General's (AG) report 2013, R5.7bn had been spent irregularly; R408m was classified as wasteful spending; R324m had been overspent to acquire goods and services; R825m was spent on unsolicited tender bids; R120m on infrastructure irregularities; and R270m was spent on security contracts which defied the supply-chain protocol.
This is but one department. Another random selection of the North West Municipalities' expenditure, makes for even more alarming reading: R29 million alone was spent on consultants to assist with the preparations of financial statements for the annual audit. Only 5 out of 25 municipalities received unqualified audited reports, apparently an improvement upon last year's results, when all 24 municipalities received qualified audits!
The litany of corruption continues: nationally, nearly R25bn disappeared in 2013 due to wasteful, irregular and unauthorised expenditure. The SA Institute of Race Relation's Lucy Holborn provides us with exactly the kind of information I needed for this column, namely, what the state could have provided with that amount of money. R25bn could have built 400 schools; it could have educated 2.5 million pupils; it could have funded 1.2 million students; it could have provided 7.4 million child support grants; it could have built 24 children's hospitals if based on the costs of the newly-created Nelson Mandela Children's Hospital that cost R1bn.
Such a financial breakdown gives us a new perspective on why corruption keeps us poor, backward and underdeveloped. India's first female president (2007-2012) emphatically claimed "corruption [to be] the enemy of development and of good governance. It must be got rid of. Both the government and the people at large must come together to achieve this national objective." Untrue to her own words, she was accused of spending more on foreign trips than her predecessor.
The perks of high office are so tantalising that unless they are constrained by law enforcement, corruption develops a life of its own. Austrian writer and journalist Karl Kraus - "Corruption is worse than prostitution. The latter might endanger the morals of an individual, the former invariably endangers the morals of the entire country." And this is what is happening in SA, corruption having seeped into almost every office of state, even amongst its watchdogs.
SA's public leaders and officials need to take a leaf out of Uruguay's president, Jose Mujica, who made the choice to live simply. Fondly known as Pepe, the president is known for saying that those who call him the poorest world leader do not understand wealth: "I'm not the poorest president. The poorest is the one who needs a lot to live." "My lifestyle is a consequence of my wounds. I'm the son of my history. There have been years when I would have been happy just to have a mattress." This former guerrilla fighter and detainee, has not forgotten what his struggle for freedom was all about unlike our liberation leaders who said: "we did not struggle to be poor."
This article first appeared in Die Burger.
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