THROW THE SKUNKS OUT
The winds of change blowing so strongly over our beloved but troubled nation allow us to dream. Dreaming, after all, is a form of planning, said journalist and political activist Gloria Steinem. “Without leaps of imagination or dreaming, we lose the excitement of possibilities.”
Now that I have tried to justify my endless dreams about the affairs of our nation, which I have been recording in this column for a while, let me dream on.
By the time you finish reading this, you may be just about to welcome the fifth president of democratic SA. And he rides on the ticket of uprooting corruption, in all its ugly forms, to eradicate all it represents. Long have we been waiting for this moment.
In addition to the changes in the cabinet we proposed here last week, the new president will have the urgent task of removing the many foul-smelling skunks who dominate the state apparatus and abuse it to achieve the nefarious ends of those who put them in those positions.
Top of the list is SA Revenue Service (Sars) commissioner Tom Moyane and his henchmen at the tax collector. His deputy, Jonas Makwakwa, needs to be booted out even sooner than his boss. Not only have these two played a crucial role in crippling the tax collector, to such an extent it has not even the slightest chance of reaching its tax collection targets, but they seem to have feathered their own nests, if reports about their alleged nepotism and dodgy financial dealings are true.
And of course, like true skunks, they leave everything and anything they come across smelling like they do.
“When threatened, it [a skunk] squirts a fine spray of foul-smelling irritant liquid from its anal glands towards its attacker,” is how the Oxford dictionary describes the mammal. Ask the disgraced auditing firm KPMG and now law firm Hogan Lovells, both of which were so overcome by their greed they thought they could feast with the skunk without being tainted by its obnoxious smell.
“Hogan Lovells’ cover-up led directly to the corrupt Moyane exonerating his corrupt deputy Makwakwa and welcoming him back [to Sars] on October 30 2017 to continue their looting and dirty work of robbing taxpayers,” said Peter Hain, in one of his crusading speeches against state capture delivered in the House of Lords this week, according to Daily Maverick. Lord Hain was urging the UK regulatory body to take punitive measures against the law firm for its role in the sham investigation of Makwakwa’s alleged dodgy dealings with undeclared cash incomes.
Obnoxious behaviour at Eskom
You would think those in charge of a progressive democratic state need a tax tsar of unimpeachable integrity. But the skunks defacing state institutions with their smell are not limited to Sars’ top echelons.
Any serious and ambitious governors need to sweep Eskom clean of this kind of obnoxious behaviour. Sars and Eskom are the two most important institutions of this democracy, which we should never have allowed to be desecrated.
Notwithstanding the sham of a disciplinary process that ostensibly cleared Eskom’s Matshela Koko of damning allegations, the new occupant of the Union Buildings will do well to quickly show him the door — along with Anoj Singh and many of his colleagues in Eskom’s executive suites. This needs to be done within the next four weeks if our long dark nights are to finally lift and allow us to chart our course unhindered by the foul smell of the skunks masquerading as civil servants. In fact, many of them belong in prison.
To these I shall limit my daydreaming for now, for the night is upon us.
The new president will have the urgent task of removing the many skunks who dominate the state apparatus