In a country where everything – everything – gets touched by the thieving hands of Government corruption, it’s good to know that someone is finally standing up and fighting corruption. That someone is… [checks notes] er… [checks notes again] er… apparently, it’s… The Government.
This image, appended to the bottom of this tweet:
Government remains committed to building an ethical State in which there is no place for corruption, patronage, rent-seeking and plundering of public money. Report any suspected corrupt activities. #AntiCorruption #FightingCorruption Read more: gov.za/anticorruption
reminded me of [an analogy I decided not to use*] or the Pope encouraging people to come forward and root out Catholicism.
It’s literally everywhere (corruption, not Catholicism) (although…) from the President’s office down.
They say a fish rots from the head, but there’s smelly sludge all over the gills, fins and tail in this case. (Can you tell that I never did more than basic fish biology during my studies?)
R4.8 million for someone to go door to door and tell people about Covid-19 – R2640 per person. A cool ten and a half grand if there’s a family of four at home when you call.
There’s R29.7 million “missing” in KZN.
The R500 billion coronavirus fund was obviously just too good an opportunity to miss:
So:
And I should probably just not mention the Eastern Cape Scooter Fiasco*.
These examples were not hard to find, at all. And one could argue that at least someone is documenting, recording and reporting them. But mostly, nothing ever happens about these cases, and even on the odd occasion when it does, the perpetrators are re-employed by their equally corrupt colleagues (and/or political party) soon afterwards anyway.
So where is the punishment?
So what is the point?
But then for the government – arguably the most guilty entity for both the enabling of and looting of public money – to tell us that “Fighting corruption is everyone’s business”?
I’ve honestly never heard such utterly hypocritical bullshit.
* 100 words in was just too soon to invoke Godwin’s Law.
** I actually saw The Eastern Cape Scooter Fiasco on the Friday at Reading in 2007. Great drummer. Energetic performance.