Small skelms to big crooks
Corruption started with little bits of crime, now it’s vast cartels
Even as then soon-to-befree Eskom CEO André de Ruyter warned that if proceedings went the applicants’ way in a collective court action, it could crash the national grid, a nasty little narrative was beginning to take root in the minds of some South Africans.
The delusion goes like this: the old regime was corrupt, but its thieves knew when to turn off the spigots of stolen money. They did not eat the whole chicken but, apparently, left some flesh behind so that the country would continue to run.
Today, the narrative goes, the looters leave nothing behind, hence the chaos of load-shedding, broken trains, rivers of sewage, potholed streets
Now, as the lights go off again, people say: “I wouldn’t mind a bit of corruption if the country functioned.”
This, as a philosophy professor I once knew would say, is terrible logic. For one thing, it ignores the genesis of the beast now devouring Eskom.
In the early, pre-freedom 1990s, private contractors were wrestling for lucrative contracts to supply prepaid meters for township homes as Eskom looked for ways of getting everyone to pay for their electricity.
It was often a dirty business, with a little industrial espionage and allegations of corruption and theft, and at least one patent lawsuit that stalled before it even got to court when a key witness left home in the middle of the night the week the case was due to be heard.
It might have been small beer. Who cared about a few sweet deals? As long as the lights stayed on, right?
And yet, here we are, more than three decades on, reaping the bitter fruits that grow in profusion when good people do nothing.