SA weary after years of poor state performance

NEARLY 20 years into our democracy, South Africans are stalled by failure fatigue.

We just cannot muster another round of righteous indignation to greet another report about another government department or institution that has dropped the ball – or sold it for the price of a Chivas and a bowl of nuts.

So when the auditor-general, Terence Nombembe, gave us his annual reality check last week, we largely shrugged it off. So what if only one in five of the institutions he vetted could give proper account of their spending? Does it really matter that the number of clean audits fell from 152 in the financial year to March 2010 to 132 a year later and to 117 in the year to March 2012?

Nombembe’s non-renewable contract runs out later this year. He has worked long, hard and well – he definitely is one of the good guys – so I am sad for him that he will go without having achieved the goal he set out when we spoke in September 2009.

He said in that interview he hoped to instill a culture of clean governance across all departments, provinces and municipalities by the end of his term.

“The glaring need is the leadership commitment to put the right systems in place, to monitor those systems and to take action when things are moving in the wrong direction,” he said.

“ will be looking at the extent to which departments promise a house, promise a road and we go and look and the road is not there. Our opinion will be talking to the fact that what was promised was not done to standard or was not done at all,” Nombembe said.

In fact, he is still getting these departments and institutions just to write down what they claim to have spent the money on and how they decided who should get the contract to deliver it.

Trevor Manuel also spoke often while he was finance minister about shifting auditing from checking the books to verifying the output achieved by public spending and then measuring the quality of that output and the value for money.

The one number from Nombembe’s dismal litany of negatives that did seem to stick for a few days was the sum of R24.8- billion wasted by provincial governments, which he characterised as the epicentre of “disintegration and fragmentation”.

In fairness to the provinces, not all of that money actually evaporated into the clouds that shade the lives of our president’s extended network of friends, relatives and party colleagues. There will have been a few classrooms built, a few pipes laid and a few intersections tarred.

Nombembe’s point was that the provinces and their subsidiary departments could not explain what they did with the money or what they got for it.

Some of it was shown to have been wasted on such things as unfinished or overpriced contracts; some of it was wrongly spent on things that should not be funded from the public purse, like private shopping trips; and a lot of it was irregularly spent without following the procedures intended to ensure that the state gets fair value for its money.

The South African Institute of Race Relations joined the game of calculating what could have been bought with the money:

• 400 new schools, 460000 basic houses or 24 specialist children’s hospitals;

• 7.4 million child support grants, 1.7 million state pensions or a year at university for 1.2 million students; or

• 550 new prisons or 120 Nkandlas.

Certainly, that R24.8-billion – about R500 for every South African alive – could have been better spent. But that is missing the point that it should never have been spent at all. We don’t have that kind of money to spare.

That amount would have covered a third of the state debt cost of R76-billion in that financial year.

It is almost exactly equal to the amount that the Finance Minister, Pravin Gordhan, slashed from the contingency re serve in order to deliver a plausible bud get last month.

We had to borrow it so that the provinces could waste it and a future generation will have to pay it back.

Nombembe continued last week to blame the poor provincial report card on a lack of leadership from the top.

“The glaring need is the leadership commitment to put the right systems in place, to monitor those systems and to take action when things are moving in the wrong direction,” he said in 2009.

“It is evident from this year’s results that audit outcomes only improved in areas where the leadership adopted a hands-on approach to addressing short comings in their respective portfolios,” he said last week.

That points to the second area in which we, the tax-paying public, are being robbed.

A vast majority of leaders deployed by the ANC in many of our provinces are, as serial investigations confirm, in business for themselves. They take a state pay check, but they own, operate or direct private companies, many of which do business with the state and even with their own departments.

Even if their companies provide excel lent service, these leaders are using time paid for by the state to run their private affairs – and lots of it. The research, calculations and networking that win tenders is not done at night when the children are in bed; it’s done by day, when they should be at work planning the roads, pipelines and construction projects the people deserve.

So let’s not worry only about what the lost money could have bought; let’s worry also about the work that could have been done by those elected representatives and state-employed officials if they gave us the time, commitment and concentration they owe us.

Brendan Boyle is editor of the Daily Dispatch