JAUNDICED EYE

for “delivery”.

Vanessa Wright, the chair of the local ratepayers’ association, who was co-ordinating the distribution, had to park her car in front of the municipal convoy to prevent the unasked-for assistance.

After initially insisting that everything was kosher, it had to eventually concede that it was “a mistake” to have tried to spirit off the supplies. Oops!

Just two days earlier, announcing that R1 billion had been set aside by the province for flood relief, KZN Premier Sihle Zikalala had said that the ANC had “learnt a lot” from the looting of Covid relief funds. This time, “no amount of corruption, maladministration or fraud will be tolerated”.

The next day with water supplies cut off in much of the province, Zikalala summoned a home delivery, a whole water tanker just for the use of his family.

When the video went viral, Zikalala, at first, claimed that it was contemptuous slander and that the footage had been digitally manipulated. Only when the testimony of his neighbours became incontestable did he come clean.

It was “a mistake”, apologised Zikalala and it will “never happen again”. Oops!

None of this is in the slightest surprising. More than two years ago, announcing that billions of private, international and taxpayer money would be made available for Covid relief, President Cyril Ramaphosa tried to forestall public cynicism with the promise that “not a cent” would be stolen.

He was right. It was not small change but billions.

What organisations like the Kathrada Foundation are achieving with their well-meaning but effete interventions is the opposite of what they intend. By pandering to the ANC, they are not advancing democracy but retarding it.

The so-called “reformist” ANC is a myth. Ramaphosa’s reformists may be stealing at a more pedestrian pace than the Zuma cabal, but that is all.

A government exists to deliver public goods. A mafia exists to thieve the public’s goods. It’s not difficult to see which one the ANC is best at.

It is clear from the degree of public scorn that greeted Ramaphosa’s and Zikalala’s promises on emergency flood relief that no one believes a word they say. That’s a dangerous position for a political party, and a country, to be in.