A FAMOUS GROUSE
WE were a little concerned, here at the Mahogany Ridge, that the average bribe amount in South Africa had risen almost 10% to R2 200 over the past year, an increase that was well above the inflation rate.
And so, the cost of living continues to soar, as does the likelihood of a festive season greatly reduced in the Yuletide cheer department with not much in the way of potted Stilton and spicy glazed nuts scattered about the place.
A bit like Christmas in Fidel Castro’s Cuba, you could say.
It’s bad enough the drought, the exorbitant cost of electricity and a stagnant economy have all contributed to rising food prices, especially at a time when they’re falling elsewhere in the world.
But it now appears that already tightly-squeezed consumers are to be further fleeced when next shopping for driver’s licences or dealing with traffic-related problems. These, incidentally, are among the most in-demand of bribery services, according to the Ethics Institute’s recent SA Citizen’s Bribery Survey.
The institute tapped 4 553 customers at their sponsor Massmart-Walmart’s stores in Gauteng, Limpopo, KwaZulu-Natal, Free State and the Western Cape.
They found that the top five reasons for resorting to bribery were to avoid motoring fines (36% of responses), to secure a job (18%), get a driver’s licence (15%), to secure a tender (7%), and to receive an unauthorised discount from business (4%).
All of these, with the exception of tender bribery, were up from the previous year, and it does make you wonder a bit about Massmart-Walmart’s customers.
Builder’s Warehouse and Makro don’t particularly strike one as being the sort of stores that would be frequented by those hoping to land an “irregular” roadworks contract from, let’s just say, the Limpopo government.
On the other hand, you never know who you may come across in the glittering aisles of Dion Wired, badgering the staff about giant flatscreen televisions and what have you.
Interestingly, the survey’s most frequently mentioned bribe amounts were R50 and R100, with the median being R700 — which meant, in order to get that R2 200 average, those at the upper end must have been enormous.
Some respondents spoke of backhanders of more than R1-million, another indication of the scale of inequality in our society. It’s not just at Shoprite Checkers where it would take the average worker some 3 500 years to earn the R100-million the chain’s outgoing CEO, Whitey Basson, is getting this year.
It is this sort of tom that is leading a principled liberation movement astray, according to ANC secretary-general Gwede Mantashe.
Addressing a Castro memorial service, he said the Cuban leader had cautioned that whenever money was involved, people took their eye off the revolution. This may explain why they’re so dirt poor in Havana.
“When we go to conference of the ANC,” Mantashe was quoted as saying, “there is a lot of cash flow. . . This prostitute called imperialism is deviating us, it is seducing us to take our eye off the ball.”
The President’s eye, however, remains firmly on that ball. He has said so himself — albeit with a slightly paranoid edge in his voice.
As the fun and games of last weekend’s NEC meeting wound down, there were reported avowals from Jacob Zuma that he would never resign because that would please the imperialist foreign forces.
More bizarrely, he claimed that his enemies had attempted to poison him on no less than three occasions. He gave no further details, but in 2014 First Lady Number Three, Nompumelelo “MaNtuli” Ntuli, was accused of poisoning him and banished from Nlandla.
With that, Zuma was off to Havana to attend the Castro funeral. There he may or may not be advised on how to deal with those foreign forces, some of whom are members of his Cabinet.
Meanwhile, at their own memorial service for the Santa Claus of Caribbean communism, EFF commander-in-chief Julius Malema poured scorn on Zuma’s poison claims.
He said that, in order to give their relationship a bit of mojo, MaNtuli had slipped her husband some korobela, a love potion that would supposedly keep him infatuated with her. She’d unfortunately used too much, he overdosed and, it was claimed, was flown to Moscow for treatment.
To Russia with love, maybe?
Malema is apparently an expert on this muthi. In 2012, in the early hours of a Thursday morning, he tweeted: “Sounds ridiculous but this is a fact: Korobela mixture of the woman’s dried period blood & crushed herbs @RediThlabi”
God knows what prompted this overshare with the talk show host, but we suspect the commander may have been hard at a few concoctions himself.
This article first appeared in the Weekend Argus.
