Use your cents wisely at poll

Every rand that government takes from you is a rand you cannot spend, save or invest yourself.

So, it owes you an answer for each one. Here is what that answer looks like on the ground:

Start in Emfuleni, the municipality on the banks of the Vaal that the ANC has run for years.

Drive through Evaton West, and you pass raw sewage running down the streets and sinkholes where the road used to be.

How a place reaches this state is written into a single contract.

Repairing Nguna Street was meant to cost R19.4 million, yet the council has spent nearly R50 million on it – and over that time the work has slipped from 85% complete to 65%.

More money went in, and less road came out. That is what a rand does when nobody is guarding it.

Emfuleni is just one municipality among many. Since 2021, councils across the country have run up R145 billion in irregular spending, R40 billion of it this past year alone, alongside a further R24 billion written off as fruitless and wasteful.

Every one of those rands was meant to fix a road, lay a pipe or keep a clinic open. Instead, it vanished somewhere between the budget and the ground.

Discipline needed

To be fair, the national picture has improved. Treasury has steadied the public finances, the country is running its first primary surplus in years, and lenders have started to trust our numbers again.

The DA pushed hard for that discipline from inside government.

But a healthier balance sheet in Pretoria has not reached the person still looking for work.

Unemployment has climbed to 33.6%, which is 8.5 million people without a job, and among the young it is even worse at 47.4%, with another 264 000 losing their jobs in a single quarter.

The economy grew by 0.5%. We have steadied the books without yet fixing the country they are meant to serve.

The difference good government makes is not a theory, because you can read it straight off the audit sheet.

Last year, the Western Cape earned 20 clean audits, more than every other province combined.

Midvaal, in Gauteng, has kept its books clean for 12 years. Nationally, only 39 of 257 councils manage a clean audit at all, and the DA runs most of them.

Money vanishing

Money handed to an ANC council tends to vanish. Money handed to a DA one tends to come back as water, roads and streetlights that work.

The bill for years of this does not stay local either. Servicing the national debt will cost R432 billion this year, more than R1 billion every day, spent on yesterday’s borrowing rather than on a new school, a police van or a working clinic.

The answer is not simply for the state to spend less. It is to spend well.

That means going through public money in detail, contract by contract, and asking the plain questions too few in government bother to ask. What did we buy? What did we pay?

What does the same thing cost the department next door? Was it delivered, and if we got nothing for it, why are we still signing the cheque?

Much of this is now a matter of will, rather than ability.

Government already holds the data to compare what every department pays for the same goods to flag duplicate contracts, the inflated prices and the supplier who bills one town three times what he bills the next.

This is the fight I intend to lead. Give the state the power to see, across every department and public entity, where it is being overcharged, and then the backbone to stop paying.

None of it works without consequences. For too long the auditor-general has flagged the same waste in the same places, and nothing has followed.

Treasury was right

Treasury was right to withhold funds from councils that keep breaking the rules.

A council should have to show it has fixed the problem before the money flows, and the manager who signed off a rotten tender should face more than a line in a report.

The same test should apply to provinces, national departments and state-owned firms.

Parliament has its part to play, too. In March, the Western Cape High Court in Cape Town struck down Section 7(4) of the VAT Act as unconstitutional, in a case the DA brought, and it now heads to the Constitutional Court.

The principle underneath it is worth defending. Government cannot raise your taxes or spend your money without answering for it to the parliament you elected. Fixing this is not the enemy of growth, it is where growth begins.

Money that is not wasted is money that can build, and a town that works is one where someone is willing to open a business and take on staff.

Every rand recovered from a crooked contract can pay for something real. A tidy set of books was never the point.

The test

The test that matters is whether a young person can find work, a family can count on water in the taps and a light that stays on, and whether the taxpayer sees anything at all for what they hand over.

On that test, the DA has a record, earned council by council and audit by audit.

So when the promises start coming, do not take them on trust. Ask to see the audit. Then vote DA, because every rand counts, as does the hand that spends it.