Budgeting for corruption

26 September, 2011

On Friday a colleague of mine went to take her driver's test. She failed, and it was not the first time - this was her fifth attempt.

Even before she got in the driver's seat her instructor told her she would have to pay a bribe to the testing official if she wanted to pass. He said this not because she was an incompetent driver or unprepared for the test. He told her this because it was just what she had to do - for her to pass the test, money needed to change hands.

Everyone makes jokes about the driver's test in South Africa. "Pay the bribe," we all joked with her beforehand.

The dilemma for her, a 23-year-old who has worked very hard to be where she is and is starting the arduous task of building her life, is that she is being told that, to get anywhere, she has to make peace with the fact that she has to pay a bribe. Someone who has honestly passed her university examinations is now being told that outside that world things work differently. She has to pay a bribe. She has to be corrupt.

How many young people are learning this devastating lesson about our country? How many young people are now facing the reality that hard work and honesty are not enough - that to get ahead one has to pay a bribe, bend the rules, be dishonest?

We all speak about corruption as though it is something that happens out there, to people we do not know. Corruption is now eating into the marrow of our being. It is becoming an everyday fact.

On Friday I gave a talk for 45 minutes on the political situation in South Africa. Afterwards, in conversation with one of the people who had attended, I realised that I had not even referred to corruption in my talk.

I realised that my omission was because of a simple yet devastating fact: I am beginning to think that corruption is normal - part of the South African way of life and therefore not even worth a proper mention and analysis.

Yet corruption is endemic. Most of my friends from elsewhere in Africa like to ask me if I want a "cold drink". It is their joke about South African policemen and women: every time my friends get stopped for some spurious reason, the policeman invariably asks for a "cold drink" to make whatever may be the problem go away.

The corruption problem is unlikely to go away. If anything, South African authorities are working hard to give the impression that crime pays and corruption will not be punished. The government continues to move with incredible slowness on some of the issues about which it should really be energetic.

Clear-cut cases of corruption are the Pretoria and Durban police-buildings lease deals. Various government officials, such as the suspended director-general of the Department of Public Works, have said they were essentially forced to sign the deals. Legal warnings not to sign the deals were ignored.

But the wheels of government have moved extremely slowly in dealing with this issue. Members of parliament - the "representatives of the people" - have even blocked opposition parties from asking the president questions about what he intends to do about these deals.

It is understandable that President Jacob Zuma has launched another inquiry into national police commissioner Bheki Cele's role in these deals because he has to act within the confines of the Police Act. But he is not so circumscribed with regard to Minister of Public Works Gwen Mahlangu-Nkabinde. He can fire her today. He can fire Minister of Co-operative Governance Sicelo Shiceka, who allegedly used taxpayers' money to visit a girlfriend in jail in Switzerland, today as well.

But Zuma has not done so. What message does that send? It says that we do not consider these transgressions and alleged acts of corruption to be serious and that, crucially, there will be no punishment.

In government work we see friends and relatives of powerful politicians become the beneficiaries of state tenders. The rest of the population has to pay a percentage of what they make on tenders to government officials or politicians.

This has now become the norm. We budget for corruption. It sits cheek by jowl with the rest of our life. It does not make us angry; we do not even mention it. It is just there and outrage is useless.

We watch our politicians battling for position and we point at those moving into new, big offices and say, admiringly: "It is his turn to eat."
We forget that it is the wealth and future of our friends, our children, of us as taxpayers, that is being eaten away by the corrupt.

http://www.timeslive.co.za/opinion/columnists/2011/09/26/budgeting-for-corruption

Why ANC hates a free press

15 August, 2010 

There has been anger, consternation and disappointment over the ANC's two-pronged move to gag the media through a tribunal and a "protection of information" bill.

I am surprised there has been so much surprise. These attempts to gag the press have nothing to do with the need for accuracy on the part of journalists, or protecting the dignity of South Africans, as claimed by ANC spokesmen.

They have, however, everything to do with the fact that the ANC right now has the weakest, greediest, most corrupt and compromised leadership since its birth 98 years ago. These so-called leaders want to shut down the medium that exposes their corruption, looting and hypocrisy.

In Polokwane, the ANC had a choice between a high road and a low road. It could, in thumping Thabo Mbeki's ambitions for a third term, have elected a leader more talented and better equipped to deliver on the promise of a free, united, non-racial and democratic South Africa.

But, as happens in all kangaroo courts and mob slayings, in its rush to destroy Mbeki the ANC chose a man whose most marked traits were a talent for populist rhetoric and an inability to lead effectively. The ANC went for the lesser man, someone whose moral, intellectual and leadership skills remain a mystery to the nation.

The ANC did not stop there. Many in its current leadership know nothing but the world of the jackboot and violence: securocrats dominate the top echelons of the party. These are not leaders who enjoy the light shone by a free press. They prefer the dark; they like secrets and the cover-ups that allow corruption to flourish.

A man who sleeps with his friends' children - one of them with mental problems and HIV-positive - cannot tolerate a free press that keeps putting the spotlight on the reprehensible behaviour of elected representatives.

Such a man cannot understand or tolerate the watchdog role of the press, hence President Jacob Zuma's utterance this week: "The constitution talks about the privacy of people. At times, things that are private are not made private in the manner in which the reportings are done."

It is in this context that one must understand the virulence of the ANC and the president on this matter. Zuma would much rather have had the country be silent while he spoke with a forked tongue on moral regeneration (a programme of which he was a government leader), safe sex (an issue on which he was supposedly a government leader) and the dangers of having multiple concurrent relationships without using protection.

This is not an elected leader who wants to be examined. The continued spotlight on him, every day and every hour, ensures that he will be found wanting. So we should not be surprised that he does not like the light. He likes things to remain "private" despite the fact that he occupies a public office.

The ANC leadership is aware that the rot has spread through the whole organisation. 

The party's discussion documents for its national general council meeting paint such a damning picture that it is amazing that an organisation so committed to secrecy should have made them public.

But debate is one thing and action is another. This is an ANC that is ready to acknowledge in public that corruption is destroying it - but, as evidence mounts that all is not right with the business dealings of its senior leader and Communications Minister Siphiwe Nyanda (the Public Protector has called for an investigation of the man) - the party stands frozen.

This is the party that wants the press to stop pointing out these wrongs. Nyanda himself wants a media tribunal. Of course he would. The press is the only entity that has dared to expose his extravagant lifestyle at taxpayers' expense: buying hugely expensive cars, living it up on champagne and sleeping at five-star hotels. All this in a country where millions go hungry every day.

We should not be surprised. When Zwelinzima Vavi pointed out that Zuma was dragging his heels on Nyanda and allegations of corruption against another minister, the ANC decided to haul Vavi before a disciplinary hearing.

We should not be surprised. Blade Nzimande, a communist leader who disgustingly chose to buy himself a car worth more than a million rands, wants a media tribunal. This is understandable. His hypocrisy in buying himself the car while teachers, doctors and nurses earn a pittance is exposed by the press. He wants these things to be "private".

We should not be surprised. 

This is what the ANC is today: a rotten, greedy, corrupt and compromised leadership which wants to muzzle the media to hide its looting of the country.

http://www.timeslive.co.za/opinion/columnists/2010/08/15/why-anc-hates-a-free-press 

A Real Election

At long last, a real election.... 

This one might even be worth staying awake for!

Apr 10, 2011

Justice Malala: There was a time, not too long ago, when many of us political animals slept through elections. We could blather on as much as we liked, but the results of elections were certain: overwhelming ANC victories almost everywhere. 

All that is changing, and it is not only the chattering classes saying so. The ANC itself is saying so. The local government elections on May 18 have suddenly become, well, elections. Power might be lost. 

Deputy President Kgalema Motlanthe went on an election walkabout in ANC strongholds in Worcester, Western Cape, last week, and realised what everyone has been telling the ANC all along: "The city of Cape Town is not there for the taking now, but I think the ANC has it within itself to prepare to win the province [in 2014]." 

This statement would have been inconceivable from an ANC leader in the past. Today, there is virtually no one in the party, apart from those living in cloud-cuckoo-land, who would dispute it.

ANC secretary-general Gwede Mantashe was told in no uncertain terms in Polokong on Thursday that the party had imposed a candidate on its members and voters would be going for an independent candidate. In many parts of the country, ANC members are canvassing for independent candidates after a surging feeling that provincial elites had imposed cronies on communities. In these areas, there is an election to be fought. 

Cosatu general secretary Zwelinzima Vavi put it eloquently last week: "We [the ANC] are going into elections with our tails between our legs, with our backs to the wall, because we have lost 1.17million jobs and 5.8million families are plunged into poverty."

For the first time, the ANC is going into an election having lost the moral high ground. The party of Nelson Mandela and Albert Luthuli now resembles something more like a corrupt, inept entity leading us towards a police state. 

The ANC's leader, Jacob Zuma, is turning into its former leader, Thabo Mbeki: he is never here.

Zuma pronounces ineffectually from African Union meetings while his security cluster is on fire. 

When he does pitch up in the country, as he did on Friday, he has nothing new to offer the ANC but fatuous comparisons between the ANC and God. 

The Star reported that Zuma told three women at a home in Helenvale that the ANC and God were of the "same church". Is that supposed to be a vote puller? 

Truth is, the ANC is rattled. This week the party brought out its big guns to campaign in Midvaal, a Gauteng municipality run by the DA. 

Midvaal irks the ANC no end because, according to the Gauteng planning commission's quality of life survey, it is the province's top municipality. Its finances - 80% of its bills are paid versus 58% in Johannesburg - are in better order than those of ANC-led, municipalities. 

Unemployment is at 26% whereas Johannesburg is at 41%. It is run by 29-year-old DA mayor, Timothy Nast. 

                                                             DA mayor, Timothy Nast.

This is a municipality the DA is refusing to let anyone forget. The party uses it constantly to drive home its message that the ANC is incompetent. The ANC argues that it lost Midvaal because of infighting between local leaders. The bottom line, though, is that the figures presented by the DA are irrefutable. And the ANC is rattled by them. 

Another area that the ANC is rattled about is Tshwane, where the party achieved a mere 56% compared with the DA's 31% in the last election. This might seem a wide margin, but if one adds the rest of the opposition to the DA's tally the difference becomes even smaller. 

Tshwane is interesting because the ANC would have lost it 10 years ago had it not ensured that huge chunks of the ANC-voting North West province were incorporated into Tshwane. This sort of gerrymandering is happening again: the Metsweding district municipality is now part of Tshwane, delivering new voting fodder. 

What now? Things are dicey in Eastern Cape, where the ANC is facing internal revolt over candidates' lists. Things are so bad that violence has been visited on provincial ANC leaders, some ANC members are in court accused of plotting murder and party members are taking it to court. 

This opens the door for the opposition, the DA in particular, to make headway. Hence the irrational attacks of Julius Malema on Helen Zille. He made "monkey" references because he fears her. He, like his party, is rattled. 

This makes for an interesting election indeed. 

http://www.timeslive.co.za/opinion/columnists/article1012131.ece/At-long-last-a-real-election