It’s official: we’ve become a gangster state

Auditor-general Kimi Makwetu this week presented a frightening report, confirming that our downward spiral is gaining momentum and that the public auditing profession has become a danger zone. Makwetu detailed how high-ranking and highly paid government officials, among them CFOs and municipal managers, brazenly offered bribes or threatened to hijack and kidnap his auditors. Those officials don’t want committed and ethical auditors to expose the theft and misuse of public money.

Officials at Rand Water, Makwetu told MPs, intimated to his auditors in August that negative audit findings “are costing them their bonuses”.

At the Victor Khanye local municipality in the Mpumalanga town of Delmas, a municipal manager warned a team of auditors in August that “they might be kidnapped due to audit findings” on dodgy tender processes.

In the same month, a CFO at Mpofana local municipality, near Pietermaritzburg, offered a bribe to a senior manager in the auditorgeneral’s office in return for a favourable audit outcome.

In November, a newspaper cutting of a report on a councillor’s murder was left in the offices that auditors were using. The auditors were looking into a R21m Nelson Mandela Bay municipal draincleaning tender with which the dead councillor just happened to have been involved.

It was clearly a threat; the auditors needed to watch their backs. Since that tender was awarded in 2018, reports indicated that 18 people, including politicians and officials, had been murdered in the municipality as a result of squabbles over proceeds from such manipulated tenders.

This is mind-boggling and scary behaviour by government officials who are paid millions to look after your hard-earned tax money.

These are bureaucrats who, in terms of laws such as the Public Finance Management Act and the Municipal Finance Management Act, have a duty to ensure that public money is not stolen or misused. But here they are, brazenly flashing that public money as perverse incentives for illegal gratification.

Makwetu said his auditors are now afraid to enter certain municipal buildings to do their work. Instead they invite these thugs moonlighting as government officials to the auditor-general’s head offices in Pretoria, a safer location for sifting through books in search of malfeasance.

If you still refuse to believe that SA has officially become a gangster state, Makwetu provided proof of it this week.

It is also concerning that members of parliament’s standing committee on the auditor-general, where this depressing report was presented, are not treating the matter with the urgency it deserves. The lives of these noble watchdogs of our public funds are under threat, but our MPs are happy to defer the issue to next year because they are in a rush to leave for their Christmas break.

For his part, the auditor-general has laid criminal complaints with the police. He has also pleaded with members of parliament to summon all the implicated municipal officials so they can face public scrutiny.

Rules of parliament allow committees of the National Assembly to ask the speaker, Thandi Modise, to grant them permission to deal with urgent matters, even beyond the stipulated period for parliamentary work. But this was not an option for our hardworking legislators. They had already booked their holidays and not even such a life-and-death matter was going to ruin those plans.

It’s a missed opportunity, but one can only hope that the matter will not have been forgotten when the MPs return to work in parliament next year.

For President Cyril Ramaphosa and cheerleaders of his new dawn, here’s an opportunity for them to put their money where their mouths are when it comes to corruption.

The auditor-general has named and shamed the thugs masquerading as CFOs and municipal managers, and now your job is to ensure that their attire changes from Armani outfits to orange jumpsuits.

When auditors of public funds are attacked in this fashion, the president, parliament and all law enforcement agencies have to act with a higher degree of urgency, and cannot procrastinate.

What Makwetu outlined this week was not just a physical threat against him and his auditors, it is also a direct attack on the constitutional mandate of public accountability and parliamentary oversight of public resources.

Such an assault on our democratic institutions has to be met with equal might from those in positions of power. Otherwise what’s next? Soon the crooks running these public looting rackets will be offering bribes to, or threatening, prosecutors, high court judges and magistrates — if prosecutions should ever ensue.

Sakhumzi Somyo, chair of the committee overseeing the auditorgeneral, has condemned these criminal acts, but that’s not good enough.

If the condemnation is not accompanied by tough action, it remains nothing but lip service.

Any further dilly-dallying on these issues will only fast-track our descent into a fully fledged gangster state.