Corruption in a pandemic: R15bn (and counting) – I want to pay my taxes to Gift of the Givers

The scale of the looting for luxury consumption pitted against the scale of the poverty and hardship you encounter everywhere is making me ill. I am sure you have the same feeling. Corruption is being exposed in real-time because the Commission of Inquiry into State Capture has made the system more transparent to civil society watchdogs.

But what the exposés of R14.2-billion – stolen from pandemic-fighting funds meant to keep the elderly, the young and all of us safe from the most dangerous virus in a century – tell us is that no money is sacred from the networks of scavengers. Fly-by-night companies and dodgy tenderpreneurs move like schools of sharks to where the next opportunity is to feed.

We have yet to read the full story, but the head of the Special Investigating Unit, Andy Mothibe, said last week that the PPE corruption was like nothing he’d ever seen before. In the Sunday Times, Sam Mkokeli described the theft as being on an industrial scale.

Mark Heywood and Ufrieda Ho, writing in Daily Maverick, uncovered that the Gauteng education department spent R431-million on sanitising schools. The Western Cape spent just over R2-million, which is likely closer to what it really costs to clean a province’s schools.

The margins are so grotesque that the contract beneficiaries almost immediately took the money, meant to keep children and their teachers safe, and blew it on expensive watches, insurance policies, new homes and cosmetic surgery. It will take years to put these people in jail – and how you recover the cost of plastic surgery, I’m not sure. Botox can’t be returned.

If you go to a vaccination site today, there is very little public education or messaging. In general, basic public health information is not being generated to answer peoples’ questions – but the health department signed a contract worth R150-million with a fly-by-night company, Digital Vibes, to do this kind of work.

It is brazen theft, and investigative journalist Pieter Louis-Myburgh will soon expose how the health department also splurged money on a nice life for the Mathers, Mkhizes and Mithas – the three families who benefited from our public health messaging money. The Guptas and Watsons (the owners of Bosasa) may be gone, but their methods remain.

In 2020, and this far in 2021, almost R15-billion has been lost to corruption, according to reports. The exposés have all been done by civil society, including the media. These have triggered investigations by the SIU. The good news is that a corruption-avoidance system is working, but the bad news is that the media scrutiny deals only with a limited number of contracts. The Auditor-General’s spending reports suggest the amounts lost are much higher.

Criminal justice reform is too slow for the speed of the hyena packs, which are already moving to infrastructure and the National Health Insurance, where the next big-money state expenditure will happen. As public administration intellectual Ivor Chipkin has written, corruption is vertically integrated into South African politics. Stopping it will take decades and, as the big three scandals of 2021 have shown, President Cyril Ramaphosa’s reformist persona is no guarantee against industrial-scale looting. 

There’s a lot to loot. 

South Africa is a middle-income country and SARS last year collected R1.25-trillion from us. Add in the provincial and local government fees and levies, and we pay Scandinavian-level taxes for basket case services. 

The impact of spending overall is poor if you look at education and health standards, or at the state of the network industries that drive the economy and unemployment – Eskom, Transnet and the data networks. The data networks are efficient but often too expensive to make an impact on development, and government has not yet managed the migration from analogue to digital to bring down costs. 

In June, we all watched as Gift of the Givers took their borehole rig to find water at the Rahima Moosa Mother and Child Hospital in Gauteng, and here earlier in the year. Ongoing water cuts meant surgeries had to be cancelled, birthing mothers could not bathe and blood from stab wounds couldn’t be cleaned off the floors. But Gift of the Givers came along and sorted the problem out without asking for a cent in return. 

We witness this time and again where the organisation will go into an emergency situation and fix it. It is already doing a significant amount of government’s work, and funding will allow an expansion. In the book “Imtiaz Sooliman and the Gift of the Givers”, journalist Shafiq Morton describes what has made the charity such a global gift. The organisation has the scale, skill and pace to do all the work our government does not do. 

So, until the thieving stops, I want the option to pay my taxes straight to the Gift of the Givers. The indirect taxes raised through VAT, the fuel levy and other forms of revenue can support the grant system, which is the most efficient of government’s programmes – although the payment system was enriching high-flyers and cronies until civil society stepped in.

Morton writes that Sooliman works on the principle of being proactive, not reactive. The South African state is reactive. He is a medical doctor with expertise in nutrition that is recognised in hotspots around the world. 

Right now, my taxes are a grudge payment – but to Gift, I would give with joy.