You know, President Jacob Zuma once made an interesting comment but it was not adequately scrutinised for its wicked meaning and the context in which it was used, which amounted to a huge insult to the poor and uneducated.
This statement was made during the Nkandla saga when the President was allegedly syphoning off taxpayers’ money and using it to build his homestead in rural Nkandla in the KwaZulu-Natal Midlands, and which now looks like a mini town.
When cornered about the issue, Zuma, with his now typical ukusineka (laughter), said the controversies surrounding Nkandla were issues only to those people who consider themselves educated. The ordinary, poor and uneducated South Africans don’t care about Nkandla.
If this was not insulting, I don’t know what is.
What the President literally meant was that poor and uneducated people in this country are too ignorant to understand and comprehend the effects and after-effects of corruption.
I want to take this opportunity to explain the effects and after-effects of corruption so that Zuma, in his ignorance, can understand and comprehend the compound effects of this malaise which, if not tackled, could lead to a civil war as evidenced now in KwaZulu-Natal and other African countries, with maybe the exception of Botswana.
If you’re a big family living together and contribute say, for argument’s sake, R1 000 for groceries. One family member then goes shopping for the desired items and decides to use R200 for his or her own selfish ends. What this means is that he or she won’t be able to buy all the items on the shopping list.
What he or she will have to do is reduce the number of items. If you asked for 24 bars of soap, only 18 bars will be bought and so on and so forth with all the other items. This means you won’t have enough to last you the whole month.
Coming closer to home, you win a tender of R1 000 to repair the notoriously pot-holed Vincent Tshabalala Road but you have to pay a bribe of R300 to secure the tender. It means you have to buy ‘Fong Kong’ items to repair the potholes or use less of the quantities required to make that repair strong enough to last. That is why, in a day or two, that road is always back to its pot-holed self each time it is repaired.
I will touch on another issue that is close to your hearts. We often hear complaints about RDP houses that melt like ice-cream when it rains. This is simply because, after paying to secure the tender, the builder did not have enough money to buy the right quantity of cement and other items required to make the walls strong enough to not be washed away by rain.
What do you do next? You then go and toyi-toyi in protest against service delivery, forgetting that corruption is the root cause of it all. The money that was meant to provide services for you has landed in someone’s pocket.
Former Finance Minister Pravin Gordhan put it very aptly the other day during his talk at The Establishment at Alex Mall – either we stop the rot, or we fight for scraps, and this is what is happening.
The same malady played itself out for years on end all over Africa – the DRC, Rwanda, Central African Republic, Kenya, Nigeria, Mali and Zimbabwe, to name but a few.
It is perceived that the high office has become a means to riches, allegedly by our own Namba One, who it seems wants the state purse to remain in the family for another 10 years in the form of his ex-wife, NDZ.
