Top brass must limit spending

One incident after another tends to confirm that many citizens, supposedly rational people in ostensibly influential positions, have a skewed idea of what their priorities should be.

Unfortunately, this does not include the cronyism, corruption and blatant nepotism which has cast such a dark light on the suspect ANC system of cadre deployment, which tends to relocate deadwood from one redundant stockpile to the next.

The still unresolved Nkandla debacle over security upgrades to President Jacob Zuma’s private housing complex in rural KwaZulu-Natal is still being debated as one instance where priorities took a back seat.

Another is the purchase by mayor Mamsie Tsoena of a R500 000 official vehicle for use at Free State’s Mantsopa municipality, which owes Eskom R92 million and faces the real possibility of the plug being pulled by the cash-strapped power utility.

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The price of the vehicle the mayor has settled on – a C-class Mercedes-Benz – will not come close to appeasing Eskom or keeping the lights on in the eastern Free State, but you would have imagined some thought being put into the purchase before it became a done deal. Especially in the light of historic gaps in the municipality’s supply chain management opening a yawning deficit of over R846 000 in the last six months of 2015.

Although the DA does not always qualify as a shining paragon of virtue, we cannot help but contrast the decision by Joburg mayor Herman Mashaba and his Tshwane counterpart Solly Msimanga to take economy class flights for a meeting in Cape Town.

The self-appointed hierarchy are not especially entitled to summarily leapfrog the citizens of this economically strapped nation, despite what the so-called VIPs might think. It is, in short, not their money they are using … and somewhere the cash will run out.