When X marks the rot spot

There is nothing as dumb as believing there is only one party you can vote for when there are more than 20 on the ballot paper every election.

Many South Africans have been caught up in this dilemma since 1994. They know the euphoria of first democratic election is gone but, like a deer caught in a snare, they are waiting for the owner of the snare to release them, when the opposite is true: their only destination is the pot.

The time has arrived when there remained only two choices: remove the rot or stay with it forever. And if you chose the latter, don’t blame anyone else but yourself.

This country endured enough corruption in the past nine wasted years – the next nine must be different. But 15 months after the last election, our hopes have been dashed. Those trusted with the power to fight corruption have begun to show their true colours: they are made of the same cloth as their predecessors.

It is not a fable that after 20 years in power, all former liberation movements flounder and often their leaders turn from liberators into dictators and oppressors. There are good example across our northern border, where leaders declared war on their voters. SA may not have similar oppression, but corruption leaves the poor suffering, hungry and homeless – the worst form of oppression.

Those who eat do so unashamedly. They eat even the crumbs falling from their own tables. Corruption has left many people without the houses they had been waiting for for many years, the poor who invested their last cent at the bank without money. There are many examples to cite but the VBS Mutual Bank and the Steinhoff sagas come to mind.

We had the arms deal, we had Nkandla, we had the state capture of the Guptas and Bosasa and now the new kind of corruption: the PPE scandal that involved the stealing of money meant to reinforce the fight against Covid-19. The awarding of contracts to supply personal protective equipment (PPE) to cadres and families of cadres of the governing party took corruption to its worst level.

It’s even more ironic that the first case to be unveiled involved an aide to the president, where her husband obtained the lion’s share of contracts awarded by the Gauteng provincial health department. This has exposed the spinelessness of the leader who came to power on the ticket of anticorruption. You would have expected him to act better than just putting his aide on special leave.

The deployment to the highest office should be at the behest of a leader who should walk the talk on corruption – especially in his own office. The core staff should be treated differently to the Public Service Act. Instead of acting decisively, he looked the other way to let the local integrity committee deal with the problem, as if the official was an elected public representative and not a functionary.

The president’s laissez faire approach to this matter left many doubting if the perpetrators of state capture would ever be prosecuted. The mere listing of the looting contractors in the PPE saga, which is not enough, dashed any hope that the real culprits would ever be jailed.

Eric Naki

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