Thank you, Tim Cohen, for highlighting that "Corruption at any level corrodes workings of state machinery" (Business Day, March 7).

Corruption is an economically inefficient crime. It affects the poor most, destroying the legitimacy of government and national security.

In SA, where 65% of the population is impoverished, corruption results in grotesque misallocation of public resources. The absurd notion that expenditure of R30bn on the arms deal would translate into offsets worth R110bn to create 64165 jobs needs to be debunked.

Yet, extraordinarily, given the arms deal fiasco, offsets remain the pivot of the trade and industry department's economic policies. Do Minister Alec Erwin and his colleagues really believe in the tooth fairy? They were repeatedly warned that offsets are notorious for corruption, and a scam promoted by the armaments industry to fleece the taxpayers of both supplier and recipient countries.

The prime offset for the purchase of three German submarines was to have been the billion-dollar Ferrostaal stainless steel plant at Coega. This has morphed into a condom factory and Pechiney's aluminium smelter, allegedly funded by blood diamonds laundered from the Democratic Republic of Congo.

The Yengeni saga has confirmed yet again that the armaments industry is an especially dirty business. Were our cabinet ministers just gullible and inexperienced, or what were the pay-offs to the African National Congress? The longer government persists in the arms deal cover-up, the more the Mbeki presidency is seen to be riddled with corruption and incompetence.

The people of SA deserve better after the skulduggery of the apartheid era than to have a gang of thugs merely replaced by the crooks of "Xhosa nostra" and "MK Inc".

With acknowledgements to Terry Crawford-Browne and Business Day.