Publication: Business Day Issued: Date: 2006-10-07 Reporter:

A Time for Making Money at Any Cost

 

Publication 

Business Day
Date 2006-10-07

Web Link

www.businessday.co.za

 

Is anything really clean anymore? Is any tender ever awarded to the deserving applicant? Is any government decision ever taken because it is manifestly in the best interests of citizens? Is there anyone honest anymore?

Cynical questions, these. But the cataract of news pointing to the avarice of our ruling elites can only produce cynicism. “R100m HOUSING TENDER GRAFT,” screams a headline in The Star this week. The previous week this newspaper told us that Paul Mashatile, Gauteng’s MEC for finance, had spent about R100 000, give or take a few thousand in change, wining and dining close associates.

“Lottery tender is big bonus for ANC brass,” chimes in Business Day. It seems the list of beneficiaries queuing up to score big from Gidani, the new lottery licence-holder, reads like a who’s who of the national executive of the African National Congress.

Meanwhile, we await the latest instalment from the Mail & Guardian on its “Oilgate exposé”, not to mention a government commission, detailing how senior ruling party figures and government officials helped a controversial businessman to bust sanctions in Iraq.

The unspoken suggestion is that the ANC or some of its leading lights have a substantial stake in the businessman’s oil company. The Mail & Guardian has recently also told us how the Post Office has gone the drastic route of criminal charges against its former CEO, now the head of MTN SA, over irregularities in the award of a controversial tender.

Meanwhile, questions about the multibillion-rand arms deal refuse to go away. We are still speculating about precisely who was the “senior South African politician” alleged to have received a R132m gift from a German company, as reported by Der Spiegel magazine.

Here at home, Noseweek magazine has earned the unbridled hatred of our rulers ­ “That despicable rag,” spat Finance Minister Trevor Manuel ­ for nothing else but a dogged determination to expose elite thievery. And we have not yet forgotten about the massive fraud perpetrated against Parliament by MPs in the Travelgate scandal, or that of a Mamelsbury inmate who used to be the ANC’s chief whip.

An ANC leader recently recalled a time when one could waltz through Zimbabwean customs without worrying about having to pay multiple bribes.

That golden era has ended ­ and the country delivered into a state of all-pervasive crookedness ­ because of the disintegration of society’s consensus against corruption *1.

That disintegration happened because the elite gradually turned the state and the economy into their own private piggy bank *1. “Really, if the people at the top are all doing it, why shouldn’t the people at the customs counter?” he asks. Why indeed.

With acknowledgements to Business Day.


*1       The fish rots from the head down.

The bigger the fish the bigger the rot.

Fish out the big corrupt fishes *2  before they pollute us all and ruin this bountiful and beautiful land.


*2      Or corrupt big fishes.