Publication	Business Day
Date	2011-10-18
Reporter	Dave Mars
Web Link	www.bday.co.za

Billions are more than even the most ambitious South Africans genuinely aspire to earn in their lifetime

A billion rand is an awful lot of money, so much that not even those who work with such large sums on paper every day as part of their jobs can really claim to have wrapped their heads around it.

Everyone can relate to thousands of rand since that is the scale of most people’s monthly earnings. Even millions have some meaning to the majority; houses are generally valued in millions of rand, or at least an accessible fraction of a million.

But billions are more than even the most ambitious South Africans genuinely aspire to earn in their lifetimes. I’ll bet internet entrepreneur Mark Shuttleworth didn’t dream of becoming a rand billionaire, although he must have realised with growing astonishment, as the dotcom boom reached its zenith, that it was a real possibility if he got the timing of his exit from the market right.

Mining magnate Patrice Motsepe was probably confident he would end up a millionaire, but billionaire? Not likely. That’s the terrain of mafia bosses, arms dealers and tenderpreneurs, not ordinary individuals.

Perhaps that’s why Special Investigating Unit head Willie Hofmeyr’s revelation, that as much as R30bn goes missing from the government’s procurement budget through corruption and incompetence every year, has been received with little more than a collective rolling of the eyes in SA.

When you survive on a welfare grant of a few hundred rand a month, or even if you earn several thousand as a policeman or nurse, R30bn is just another big figure that means no more or less to you than R30m or even R300 000. Billions belong in the national budget or balance sheets of multinationals, not in the consciousness of mere mortals.

Perhaps if Hofmeyr had stood up and said half-a-million starter houses had been washed away in a flood of human greed, political corruption and simple incompetence, or that this year’s entire defence budget had been handed over to Barry Tannenbaum for safekeeping. Perhaps that would have made South Africans angry rather than resigned to their fate as the perpetual poor and powerless.

But not the announcement that R30bn of our hard-earned money ­ about a fifth of this year’s total government procurement budget ­ has been stolen or wasted. That hasn’t driven people out on to the streets demanding that the culprits be brought to book; it is met with passive acceptance.

The foreign media can’t get over it. Just about all serious international newspapers and broadcasters reported on Hofmeyr’s speech, and most commented on how little effect it seems to have had on ordinary South Africans. An event that would bring down governments elsewhere is a fleeting headline in South Africa.

Here we like to complain bitterly about service delivery, toyi-toyi for higher wages at the drop of a hat, and even throw stones at police at the slightest provocation. But we don’t punish those responsible at the polls. We fought so hard for the right to vote, but we place little value on that ballot. It is a ritual we go through every five years to make us feel we live in a democracy, not to drive real change.

Maybe it’s in our genes. There’s been a spate of research lately into how people process good and bad news, and particularly why for some the glass is always half full and for others half empty. Scientists at University College London found most people are just born optimists, and retain a positive world view no matter what life throws at them. This explains why, for example, graphic "smoking kills" messages have a limited effect on otherwise rational people ­ their brains keep telling them their chances of getting cancer are low, despite all evidence to the contrary.

Researchers from the same university collaborated with colleagues at the universities of California and Zurich and Harvard Medical School in a genetic study involving identical twins, which found that a positive outlook is highly heritable. And, controversially, that the responsible genes are more common in particular race groups, with Asians most predisposed towards pessimism and Africans more likely than any other group to look on the bright side.

In the context of South Africa’s battle against corruption, I can’t decide whether that is a good or a bad thing.

• Mars is Cape editor.

With acknowledgements to Dave Mars and Business Day.

This country is indeed blighted by wall-to-wall corruption.

It is not an elaboration to say that the slippery slope started with the Arms Deal.

But most South Africans merely acknowledge corruption, but are not prepared to do much about it.

When I got involved in blowing the whistle on the Arms Deal I not only spent millions of Rands on legal fees and thousands of manhours in litigation in the spherical envelopment of the relevant perpetrators, I actually got very little support in this regard. Indeed even of this little support, it was only moral support and no substantive support.

And despite spectacular legal successes, this has all come to very little thus far.

One can only hope the old campaigner Terry Crawford-Browne gets his day with the Arms Deal Commission that still needs its commissioners identified and terms of reference published more than a month after it was announced.