What lifestyle audits say about politics
Fikile-Ntsikelelo Moya is editor of the Mercury. Follow him on
@Fikelelom
MUCH has been said about the ANC National General Council resolution calling for lifestyle audits for public servants and in business.
What this amounts to is promoting the idea of searching the pockets of those who are thought could be thieves without dealing with why they feel the need to steal. I am not suggesting there is ever a good reason to steal. But a hungry person left to guard the bakery will make the worst possible security guard.
By emphasising the passing of the test and not a clean life, the ANC is like a sports coach who tells their charge to ensure they’re not caught doping instead of helping them find ways of being better at their game.
The ANC must acknowledge that its leaders over the years have cultivated the culture that has aided and abetted the flourishing of a lifestyle that now requires to be audited.
By attending to audits and the culture that promotes corruption and pillaging of state resources, the party is merely dealing with the symptoms.
When the president says it is cold outside the ANC or that if you want your business to succeed, you must link up with the ANC, he is creating or encouraging a culture that is in the long run bad for the values of our society.
Every year, billions of rand in state money is misspent or unaccounted for – long-hand for stolen – yet we remain with very low (if any) numbers on those convicted for flouting the Public Finance Management Act.
Obviously not everyone who works in the public service is an ANC member or supporter, but since they work for an ANC-led government, corruption, fraud and theft from the state coffers reflects on the governing party, and correctly so.
With talk in some circles that councillors should earn the same as Members of Parliament, you can expect that there will be more bloodletting as comrades vie for the office and the material comforts it brings.
The ANC must get tough on its own members such as Northern Cape chairman John Block who stands accused of fraud, corruption and money laundering for allegedly accepting kickbacks from a prop-
Politicians abuse their office for personal gain, but the measure of this is less important than the reasons it is tolerated, and even supported
erty developer leasing buildings to the provincial government. Unless its talk of lifestyle audits is mere lip service.
It gets worse when Block has continued in his role as MEC for finance despite his being charged with having his hand in the cookie jar.
Even if Block is acquitted, it’ll serve the party to introspect and ask itself some uncomfortable questions about how its own leaders project leadership as meaning living a life of caviar and champagne.
One can tell the ANC in town by the number of its members gathering at some of the poshest drinking holes and consuming the finest beverages.
In some cases, this is accompanied by the most shameless objectifying of young women who are paraded as mere trophies on the arm of a man who considers himself as having arrived.
Instead of lifestyle audits, or perhaps together with them, the ANC should encourage its members to reflect on their apparent reverence for material possessions and whether they’re not promoting the wrong ideas about what leadership means.
The party must make frugality fashionable and stigmatise the vulgar flashing of cash, no matter how it was acquired.
There is a tendency by ANC supporters to pretend that anyone calling for financial prudence and frugality is in reality calling for government officials to live in sub-standard accommodation or drive rickety old jalopies fit to take university students to campus.
If the ANC wants it leaders to go through the eye of the needle, it must require that they do more than just pass a lifestyle audit.
It is no secret that passing an audit does not necessarily mean the suspected deed has not been done.
It may well mean the paper trail and alibis check out.
It is no secret that there are many who have joined the ANC with the sole intention of enriching themselves.
They must remind members and leaders that the ANC’s 2001 document “Through the eye of the needle” comes from the biblical story about a rich man so attached to his material wealth that Jesus told him it was easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for the rich to enter heaven.
Since the ANC has chosen the phrase as a rallying cry, it might as well go ahead and have a discussion with its members about the attachment to worldly goods and how this affects the capacity of the party to deliver on the popular mandate it has.