Criminal justice system should harshly deal with those looting State coffers
I HAVE a relative – a young man, who is serving time in prison for robbing his neighbour of her phone at knifepoint. It is also that time of the year when the number of cash van heists and other robberies increase.
Incidentally, it is also the time of the year that the auditor-general releases audits for state departments and the various tiers of government.
This year there is a mixture of good and bad. More municipalities have had clean audits. Ethekwini, for example, has had its first in 16 years.
The reason I told you about my relative was to point out how distorted the criminal justice system seems to me.
Auditor-General Kimi Makwetu announced last month that there had been irregular expenditure of R25.7 billion across the country’s national and provincial departments and public entities in the 2014/15 financial year. This marked a decrease of 27 percent from the previous year.
Fruitless and wasteful expenditure declined from R1.2bn in the previous financial year to R936 million. Unauthorised expenditure dropped from R2.6bn to R1.6bn.
Makwetu said 40 municipalities (14 percent) and 18 municipal entities (32 percent) achieved clean audits for the financial year. Of the 335 municipalities and municipal entities audited, 102 improved‚ 194 remained constant‚ 27 regressed‚ two were new and 10 were still outstanding.
It will be wrong and unfair to say that all of the R25.7bn the auditorgeneral laments about was stolen. I am certain that some of that money was genuinely spent on what was needed but record keeping was poor.
It would also be naïve to think that just because the paper trail was in order it does not mean that any monies were stolen.
A clean audit does not in and by itself mean that monies were spent where they were supposed to.
Under these circumstances it does not seem right that a person who steals a R2000 phone will be punished harsher than a person who used R1m “in irregular expenditure”. I am in no way condoning crime. I fully appreciate that the act of armed robbery is one of the most prevalent in South Africa and in many cases, youngsters such as my kinsman, rise to commit worse crimes and in many instances murder.
Furthermore, the trauma of being a victim of a violent crime cannot be quantified by the cost of the stolen property.
As things stand, all those criminals planning big robberies this festive season would have been better off working for the state.
They would not only not need to carry guns and shed blood, they would get a monthly salary, a pension and relatively secure job for the rest of their lives.
They could do this in the full knowledge that statistically, their chances of being charged and convicted of flouting the Public Finances Management Act regulations were close to zero.
To this day, extremely few, if any person, has been convicted of falling foul to the PFMA.
This is unlike the numbers of those arrested and sent to jail for other crimes, like my relative.
Though the feeling in many quarters is that reporting crime is merely for insurance claim purposes, my relative is proof that there are categories of crimes where police do act decisively.
It is through SAPS efforts more than anyone else that we have prison populations that are greater than the capacity of the jails to keep inmates.
Until those who work for the state start to appreciate that there will be consequences for misspending or stealing state money – just like there are for those who rob others of cheap phones, the further away we will be from audits that show that money was spent as it was required.
By jailing the likes of my relative and allowing state officials to get away with their deeds, we send a message that some crimes are worth pursuing more than others.
A common refrain is to blame cadre deployment for these wrongs. I disagree.
The problems come with appointing the wrong people and having weak leaders who are unable to lead by example or pay attention to detail. Lest we forget that Nelson Mandela and Thuli Madonsela are examples of deployed cadres whose efforts the anti-cadre deployment lobby cannot fault.
Without doing any research, I instinctively suspect that at the heart of the so-called succession debate in the governing party is the battle to have the “right” fingers in the public finances cookie jar.
To stop the looting will then be a boost to democracy. It would be about selecting the right people for the right skills to do the right things instead of wanting a person who will allow for common criminals to loot our state under the protection of the limits imposed on the PMFA.
Just like my kinsman is turning his neighbourhood into a dangerous area, those who loot the state are also making South Africa a dangerous country to live in. They belong together in a prison cell.
@fikelelo