The proverbial story of a performance measure for one indicator at the expense of the rest has caught up with South Africa's obsession to prove its state capture and corruption theory correct. The tale goes 'a physiotherapist hospital was lauded for its best performance in keeping patients for a record less time in hospital bed than any other in the world. It received as many awards as the number of wards it had. When a total quality management analyst zoomed into the hospital it found that it had the highest number of arm and leg amputees."
The post-2017 ANC leadership remains the most lauded of ANC leaderships that was decisive on dealing with 'a yet to be scholarly defined State Capture and its adjunct Corruption'. Spending of the State Procurement budget has been responding well to the drive to rid the country of state capture and corruption, a spike in budget roll overs and a record below par decisiveness on service delivery based procurement decisions, is evidence. The state as one of the bulk purchasers of goods and services has not been buying as many goods. There is a healthy growth of good auditor-general reporting on the behaviour of the post-2017 bureaucracy. A sizeable number of public service posts remain vacant as decisions to fill them are taken within the firmament of wanting to stay 'state uncaptured' and 'less corrupt'.
In the State Owned Enterprises domain of government the zeal to remove 'state capture and corruption' related contracts has seen the abrupt removal of train station and rail infrastructure based security companies shortly before the COVID19 induced national lockdown. Most of the security companies were directly linked to the in-governing party factional battles and the need to demonstrate that gains of 'state capturers' could be summarily reversed.
This context started to permeate into as many areas of service delivery as the 'fight against state capture narrative' could allow. The withdrawal of security tenders in particular was not considered in the context of them being a critical component of a national crime fighting drive, and thus a first response mechanism of the national security architecture. As this success of fighting state capture and corruption was becoming a runaway global benchmark, so was the pilfering of public infrastructure as manifest in electricity cable theft, electricity transformer theft, solar electricity battery thefts in cellular telephony masts, water pump thieving when electricity is down, rail stripping, and all scrap metal related theft which has now developed its own political economy.
The absence of this first response mechanism has lately moved onto most national security key points. The OR Tambo Airport, which has assumed a ghost town character when you travel in ungodly hours, has become a haven of the homeless in its parking infrastructure. The Parliament precinct has had many of the homeless people roaming its grounds even when the security personnel was in its active state of alert. Similar sightings are reported in the Union Buildings and other abandoned offices of government at the altar of a 'no-strategy' work from home policy to respond to the pandemic demands of social distancing. In the absence of people in offices, contracts are cancelled, small and medium enterprises get out of state procurement linked business, and as a consequence many join the unemployed brigades.
These structurally induced consequences have for a while been subsumed into the 'state capture and anti corruption narrative', whence it is a successful project. It even competed for airtime space in the news narrative when Parliament was burning as a result of the systemic issues raised in this rendition. NEHAWU will be addressing a press conference to clarify circumstances behind the withdrawal of security personnel during the December holiday period. Already the person that was announced by the President to have been held for questioning is 'reported' to being one of the homeless people that found shelter in a perennially unoccupied Parliament building for as long as South Africa was clamouring to be compliant to the global governance of the pandemic.
A subtext of the withdrawal of security companies has been the removal from opportunity of the RET forces to starve them of money to contest the various conferences leading up to the December 2022 grand finale. Such starving has seen the collapse of good, black owned, and on a efficiency wicket companies collapse purely because they were procured during the "9 waisted years".
In conditions where security is relaxed, and in the part of the country where 'veldfires' are a common occurrence, the possibility of it being a mecca of pyromaniacs cannot be overruled. WebMD describes Pyromania as "a type of impulse control disorder that is characterized by being unable to resist starting fires. People with pyromania know that setting fires is harmful. But setting fires is the only way they can relieve their built-up tension, anxiety, or arousal. They feel satisfaction or relief after they set a fire". In a country that does not seem to be open minded about cause and effect, purely because of obsession in proving a thesis of status quo maintenance, the intelligent of pyromaniacs could find a context to practice undetected". Pyromania is a psychiatric disorder.
There are however other proverbial fires with their own pyromaniacs of a special type, and disguised as factions within the governing political elite. These 'pyromaniacs' fight battles of a 'scorched earth' type to gain political control of the state. They don't care about the impact of the factional decisions, for as long as they would have made their point or defended their 'principle'. We have seen the pyromaniacs of a special type in the judicial decisions made, internal disciplinary hearings by presiding officers who have become the law themselves, the quality and content of charges that make it through nefarious criteria of new breeds of premafacie evidence, and the general dictatorships packaged as part of ridding the country of state capture and corruption.
The success of making the state uncaptured seems to have bred a success of its collapse. One indicator cannot be a context of all that the State is all about. CUT!!!
🤷🏿♂️A ndzo ti vulavulela
🤷🏿♂️Be ngisho nje
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