WARNING: This is Version 1 of my old archive, so Photos will NOT work and many links will NOT work. But you can find articles by searching on the Titles. There is a lot of information in this archive. Use the SEARCH BAR at the top right. Prior to December 2012; I was a pro-Christian type of Conservative. I was unaware of the mass of Jewish lies in history, especially the lies regarding WW2 and Hitler. So in here you will find pro-Jewish and pro-Israel material. I was definitely WRONG about the Boeremag and Janusz Walus. They were for real.
Original Post Date: 2007-02-28 Time: 00:00:00 Posted By: Jan
Commentary:
At the risk of attracting ever-increasing condemnation as a serial government-basher who allegedly “never has anything good to say about our leaders”, I want to suggest that the government is its own worst enemy.
How, in heaven’s name, can they or any of their supporters ever justify the rotten fund-raising scheme, whereby cabinet ministers and senior officials of their departments prostitute themselves by selling crucial information about forthcoming big decisions which their ministries will take?
Where they often denied corruption – even if they were never convincing – they have now declared open season to all sorts of skulduggery. Endemic corruption is now the official ANC policy, and the new scheme deviously attempts to circumvent accusations of conflict of interest.
I do not buy any of the “assurances” that the scheme is kosher, and we have nothing to fear from a fund-raising exercise; as far as I am concerned the whole thing is nothing but corruption at a very high level, finish and klaar.
What would stop these people from beating the so-called “checks and balances”, and secretly peddling state secrets to the highest bidder and keeping the loot for themselves?
With BEE gone to hell and beyond with its cronyism, why would the men and women holding the ANC’s purse strings not give all the lucrative information and contracts to their friends in BEE circles, and for very fat kickbacks? Remember what one senior ANC leader once said without a tinge of shame: “I did not join the struggle to be poor.”
This is rot with block letters, the kind that the ANC is slyly introducing.
Suppose the loquacious and highly excitable minister of, say, correctional services wishes to build a number of maximum security prisons in certain areas of the country. The bureaucrats would do the sums, while a particular bunch would start on environmental impact assessment studies.
Bidding competition
For R60 000 a shot, the minister would impart the privileged information to the huge construction companies, and therein lies the first pitfall: if the companies wanted the contract very badly – and they would – what would stop the ANC finance honchos from encouraging bidding competition for the minister’s time and information, while all the time raising the ante for the dubious “privilege” of being their best choice?
And when the time for the actual tendering came, what would stop the director-general from influencing the bid of a company which had fully oiled their party’s finance machinery?
Would we be so naive as to believe that the official would be immune from temptation, given the already highly corrupt environment of our bureaucracy?
A firm wishing to cash in on a lucrative contract to conduct an environmental impact assessment study where the prisons would be built might wish to “thank” the director-general for not only feeding it valuable information, but for ensuring the firm won the tender.
The grateful board might want to arrange a special payment, a backhander, but the director-general’s half-hearted “Oh, but I was only doing my job” protest would not impress the directors; they would press on with their wish.
In all probability the director-general would eventually relent and accept the “token gift of thanks” – on condition the huge amount was paid out in his wife’s name and into her bank account, just to muddy the paper trail.
And we still hear people in government talking about the need to find our “moral compass”! With such patently corrupt schemes, no wonder the compass is lost!
The above example is an idealised scenario, I agree, but would you say it is exaggerated?
Jon Qwelane’s column is published each week on News24, courtesy of Jon Qwelane and the editor of Sunday Sun, which originally carried the article.
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