Under Ramaphosa, corruption thrives, while life gets harder
· Citizen
President Cyril Ramaphosa’s once formidable popularity rested heavily on the belief that the state-capture era was over. South Africans were mistaken. Under Ramaphosa, daily life for most people has become demonstrably harder, while corruption has not only continued, but thrived.
South Africa had unfortunately failed to emulate the attempts, however flawed, at Covid accounting undertaken in the US, Britain and elsewhere: that took which decisions, on what evidence and with what consequences for public health, individual rights and the economy.
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There is another part of that reckoning that is far less controversial, but as important: who stole what and why are they walking free? When Ramaphosa in 2020 announced a massive package of R500 billion to counter the pandemic, he recklessly promised that “every cent will be accounted for”.
Special National Prosecuting Authority (NPA) units would “act immediately and arrest” wherever evidence of corruption was found and he vowed to “make sure the guilty go to jail”. That’s not what happened.
Instead came a feeding frenzy. By 2022, the Special Investigating Unit (SIU) had examined 5 515 contracts, worth R17.8 billion, awarded to 3 058 service providers. It found irregularities involving 1 316 suppliers and 2 965 contracts worth R8.9 billion. In other words, almost three out of five contracts investigated were found to be irregular.
It was a frenzy in which almost anyone could join. Treasury’s own tender lists showed sports shops selling surgical gloves and hairdressing salons suddenly supplying sanitiser. The audacity of the procurement scams gives some indication of the depth and breadth of complicity within the government entities awarding tenders.
Surgical gloves that ordinarily cost between 80c and R2.50 a pair were acquired for R234-R356 a pair. Face shields, for which National Treasury had set a maximum price of R59.50 at the height of international supply shortages, fetched up to R6 200 each.
By October 2022, the SIU had generated 456 referrals for disciplinary action against public officials, 348 referrals for administrative action, including blacklisting, and 476 referrals of people and companies for possible criminal action. If the wrongdoing was industrial in scale, the consequences were decidedly spaza-shop.
At the end of that year, those 476 criminal referrals had produced only 12 arrests which, ultimately, delivered the pathetic tally of two guilty verdicts. The bulk, the cluster reported, were still under investigation.
Three years later, the Hawks told parliament that of 93 Covid cases arising from SIU referrals, 59 were still investigated, 22 were before court and 12 awaited an NPA decision. The civil machinery did somewhat better.
The SIU identified R566 million in cash and assets for potential recovery but, by October 2022, had actually clawed back only R36.3 million: barely six cents in every rand. What is needed now is a full public accounting of all the unexamined tenders, as well as every one of those Covid criminal referrals.
As the Madlanga commission demonstrates, sustained public scrutiny has a concentrating effect on public institutions that have become accustomed to delay, obfuscation and closing files.
A public accounting is like sunlight, which we learnt during Covid, is remarkably effective at eradicating nasty viruses on surfaces. Six years on, it might usefully be applied to all the other lingering toxic residues of the pandemic.