Nkandla profligacy is just immoral
THE contrast is so striking you couldn’t make it up: on Sunday, City Press reports the government is footing all but 5% of the R203m bill for upgrading President Jacob Zuma’s private homestead at Nkandla; the following day, Business Day reveals that Malawi’s President Joyce Banda has voluntarily taken a 30% salary cut to share her citizens’ “austerity pain”.
It is possible to take such superficial comparisons too far, of course. Ms Banda inherited a country and economy that were on the brink of collapse when she was propelled into office last April after the sudden death of her predecessor. She has managed to get Malawi on track for a slow recovery — primarily by repairing relations with former colonial power and major donor the UK and key financial institutions such as the International Monetary Fund — but Malawi will remain among the poorest countries in the world for the foreseeable future.
SA has also hit choppy waters economically due to international factors beyond our control and domestic political and policy ructions directly caused by the tussle for the leadership of the ruling party, but we come off a far higher base and the word “austerity” has hardly entered our everyday vocabulary. The average South African is much better off than the average Malawian, which is why so many Malawians have migrated south.
Yet, particularly in the wake of the Marikana tragedy, which brought to the world’s attention the abysmal living conditions in the communities that surround many of SA’s mines — and almost daily accounts of corruption, service delivery failures and associated protests — one can’t help thinking how nice it would be to have a president whose actions matched his claims of solidarity with the poor.
Instead, we have a government whose instinctive response to the City Press expose is not to calmly deny its veracity, or attempt to explain why it is more important for Mr Zuma’s home to have airconditioned underground bunkers and a private clinic than for thousands of homeless South Africans to have a roof over their heads, but to launch a witch-hunt to find out how City Press got hold of the documents on which it based its story.
Public Works Minister Thulas Nxesi’s statement yesterday, in which he claimed “everything that has been approved and carried out at the private residence of the current president is in line with the ministerial handbook”, seems oblivious to how uncannily similar he sounds to his pompous, fingerwagging predecessors of the apartheid era: “… any information relating to security measures of a national key point is protected from disclosure in terms of the act, the provisions of the Protection of Information Act, the Minimum Information Security Standards and other relevant security prescripts of the State Security Agency …”.
The trouble is, unless it has been secretly revised, the now infamous ministerial handbook, which is rapidly becoming known as the “rent-seeker’s bible”, actually says no more than R100,000 can legally be spent on the private residences of Cabinet ministers to provide adequate security, and specifically requires that any other renovation, extension or maintenance work is for the account of the individual owner. And while it is true that the president’s private home is a “key point” in terms of security legislation inherited from apartheid, security spending in terms of this law must be drawn from a special account and accounted for through specific procedures, not allocated from the public works budget at the whim of the minister.
Presidency spokesman Mac Maharaj’s recent attempt to paint Mr Zuma as the scourge of corrupt officials rings hollow in the face of such behaviour. What is happening may not be illegal, although it certainly seems that way, but in a country of such inequality, it is immoral to rape the public purse like this.