Cable thieves dragged through court, but we drag our feet with the master thieves

I was interested to see a recent news report that an individual who had been caught red-handed stealing railway locomotive parts was convicted and sentenced to six years in jail.

My first instinct was one of civic indignation and then a certain satisfaction.

“I hope that sends a strong message,” I thought. “Maybe we can start to turn the tide against this kind of economic sabotage!”

As my righteous fury began to subside, I considered that what this person – a certain Petros Vingiran – had done, was a type of state capture. State capture on the nano scale, of course, but this is actually another case of misappropriating state resources for personal enrichment. No more, no less.

Vingiran, of course, was convicted in rapid haste. His offence was committed in October last year, and he is already in jail. In South African terms, that is fast enough to almost qualify as time travel!

But as we have noted, his offence was a small example of a society-wide problem – the stripping of the state for scrap.

What Vingiran did, when he tried to remove a set of locomotive bearings, was similar to what happens in municipalities across the country, when tender prices are inflated and awarded to cronies of officials who then don’t even bother completing the project.

It is of the same order of criminality as the payment of kickbacks to award a contract. It’s the same type of crime as staffing a department with ghost workers and individuals who do nothing but collect a salary.

However, prosecuting the criminals at the top of the food chain, the elite thieves of state resources, is a laborious process that itself costs further millions of rands.

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The Zondo Commission has exploded into a billion-rand industry that has indeed exposed a lot of corruption and helped us understand the logistics of state capture, but not actually led to any prosecutions yet.

Corruption cases that have been public knowledge for decades somehow never quite come to finality. We debate the merits and the meaning of the step-aside resolution, and the biggest looters in the land stay free and retain the very jobs that enable them to loot.

Make no mistake, we need to aggressively prosecute the vandals who steal our country’s physical infrastructure resources and sell it to enrich themselves.

But their impact on our country is just a grassroots manifestation of a culture of theft that began at the very top of our government. Can we really blame the poor and desperate for emulating the corruption of their “leaders”, particularly when those leaders are indirectly stealing from them?

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Because the millions diverted into the pockets of politicians and officials is money that will not be spent to construct schools and hospitals, to pay grants, to employ doctors, and yes, to build railways.

The corrupt battalions of looters in our leadership have long been stealing railway tracks and locomotive bearings at a far greater scale than the wretched Petros Vingiran.

We welcome the rapid prosecution of physical infrastructure thieves, and punitive minimum sentences for cable theft and those kinds of offences. But we need to show similar zeal in the way we prosecute the master thieves who have been plundering our country’s resources for years.