Honour among cities’ thieves
It’s no easy feat wasting R16bn, but our ANC lads give it their very best shots Durban POISON
OUR shiny new president is so far proving to be a much safer bet than the previous model, which was about as trustworthy as a Ford Kuga on a hot day.
Jacob Zuma’s tendency to burst into song rather than flames disappointed many South Africans over the years.
This week, Squirrel Ramaphosa announced in Parliament that he would be donating half of his salary to a fund managed by the Nelson Mandela Foundation.
People who are too mean to even tip car guards are asking: why only half ? Why not his entire salary? Be reasonable. The man has a net worth of R6.4billion. That’s pathetic compared to Nicky Oppenheimer’s R92bn.
In other happy news, cadre deployment has proved to be a massive success as councillors and mayors around the country outdo themselves once again.
Two years ago, irregular expenditure by municipalities increased by more than 50% to R16bn. However, rising to the challenge in the last financial year, they managed to boost irregular expenditure by an impressive 75%.
They probably had outside assistance, but still it couldn’t have been easy. You don’t just squander and loot that much money overnight. It takes… well, it takes a year, apparently.
I remember having friends who worked for the Durban municipality. While it was nothing to be terribly proud of, it wasn’t anything to be deeply ashamed of, either. It was a way to earn beer money and stay out of trouble during the day. None of them ever rocked up at the jol in a new Ferrari or went from living in a bachelor flat to a five-bedroomed house overnight.
I’m sure there was corruption at the municipality back then, but none of my mates ever benefited from it. Too honest? Too stupid? Hard to say.
Come 2018 and Auditor-general Kimi Makwetu says in the past year there has been R28bn in irregular expenditure among the 257 municipalities assessed by his office.
Few people reading this will be able to grasp the concept of R28bn. Think of it this way: for that kind of money, you’d be able to fill 400 swimming pools with Johnnie Walker Black.
That’s enough to keep every man, woman and child drunk for three straight months.
Every year for the past five years the auditor-general has called a press conference and begged municipalities to take action. And every year they take this as a challenge to squander and steal even more money than they did the previous year.
The Eastern Cape, that glittering jewel in the provincial firmament, once again did the expected and walked away with R13.5bn of the total wasted.
That’s a solid 35% of the province’s budget.
Taking the individual title was the Nelson Mandela Bay Metro, incurring an impressive R8.1bn in irregular expenditure.
Another Eastern Cape municipality‚ OR Tambo District, put in a sterling effort but had to settle for second best with R3bn wasted, lost and stolen.
Fifteen Eastern Cape municipalities are in “distress”, whatever that means. I get distressed if I run out of beer on a Sunday. Eighty municipalities in the Free State are on the brink of collapse. Me, too, if I get to the shebeen before it closes.
Third to ninth positions on the roll of dishonour were filled by the city of Tshwane, the hellholes of Rustenburg and Ngaka Modiri Molema District in the North
West, the eternally appalling Johannesburg, Ekurhuleni, Buffalo City Metro and the scintillating metropolis of Madibeng.
Rounding out the list of most not-wanted municipalities and squeaking into the top 10 was tiny Moretele in the North West, punching above its weight with a cheeky R557m of irregular expenditure.
All 10 have made the list for the last three years running. If employees had shown that kind of commitment and dedication in their day jobs, who knows… ah, hell. What’s the point...
Meanwhile, refusing to be outdone, not a single municipality in the Free State, North West and Limpopo received a clean audit. Not one.
It was probably orchestrated. That way nobody could be held up as a shining example to the others. No one likes a shining example. It just makes the rest of us look bad.
Standing upwind from the others, awkwardly shuffling their shiny goody two-shoes and trying not to look overly righteous are the 33 municipalities that got clean audits.
Coming as a surprise to exactly nobody, most of them are in the Western Cape.
The other 224 rotting municipalities remain curled up in the foetal position whimpering: “Go away. It wasn’t me.”
Here’s another fun fact. Almost two out of three municipalities filed financial statements and performance reports so unintelligible and flawed that they might as well have been written in Aramaic on Wimpy serviettes.
And two out of three municipalities are dysfunctional, while 87 need “urgent intervention”.
They also need bigger cars, more overseas travel and better quality chicken wings, but time is money and both are running out fast.
The auditor-general must loathe his job. Every year since 2013, he gets up and repeats the same sad story and issues the same old warnings and taxpayers murmur and mutter darkly while the minister du jour says something really must be done and that’s it for another year.
Makwetu said that in 2015-2016, 61% of municipalities made no attempt to even investigate his reports of wholesale malfeasance and mayhem.
I’m not especially surprised by this. If my mates were robbing the company and giving me a cut and someone came along and said something’s not right and asked me to look into it, I’d stare him in the eye, shake his hand firmly and, once he’d gone, get the lads around to my house for a whisky and tell them to step up the pace.
Makwetu also said the “audit environment” in which teams had to work had become more hostile.
Yes, I expect it would in provinces where whistle-blowers and political adversaries are routinely found in remote areas suffering from an unexpected shortness of life.
If I wasn’t so white, privileged and allergic to police, I’d be tempted to join a service delivery protest. Thuma mina. With a baseball bat.