Eastern Cape premier Oscar Mabuyane found himself in the middle of a scandal at the weekend after it was revealed that a strategy document that he had signed was extensively plagiarised.
According to reports, the provincial digital transformation framework and strategy plan 2020-2025 was almost a copy and paste of that which was signed five years ago by the former leader of Australia’s Labour Party, Brendan Howlin.
The document, which had even the foreword entirely plagiarised, had been signed by both the premier and the provincial cabinet director-general Mbulelo Sogoni.
As a result of this, the approval of the strategy by the executive council has since been withdrawn while an investigation is under way.
The matter has attracted a lot of attention, with many on social media characterising it yet another scandal in a province that is constantly in the news for all the wrong reasons.
While I understand these sentiments, and agree with them to a great degree, I think this is an incident that demands more than just being dismissed as “another EC scandal”.
It is an issue that demands critical reflection, because it is not just about plagiarism, it is about the very fibre of governance and what its failure means for the people of the poorest province in the country, based on data recently published by Statistics SA.
Firstly, the idea that an ICT strategy for an underdeveloped province like the EC can be plagiarised from a highly developed country like Australia is both laughable and tragic.
The province has neither the infrastructure nor the resources to facilitate the kind of development strategy that applies in Australia.
The capital and skills required to implement a digital transformation the nature of that of Australia do not exist even in wealthier provinces in South Africa — and certainly not in the EC.
The provincial government claims that the implementation plan, projects to be implemented and location of the projects that were meant to be implemented as part of the strategy were the parts that were not plagiarised.
In essence, it is arguing that the real substance of the strategy was authentic, but since the 33-page document isn’t publicly accessible, we will have to take the provincial government’s word for it. And it is a word with little value.
Secondly, the fact that this strategy was signed off by the premier and the provincial DG is indicative of an entire chain of monitoring and evaluation that has completely broken down.
I am an employee of government. I started working in national government immediately after I left Rhodes University and am now in the second year of employment in local government.
Perhaps more importantly is that I have always worked in political office, first in the office of the minister in two national departments and presently, in the office of the executive mayor in one of the country’s metropolitan municipalities.
I know that before any strategy gets to political office, it would have gone through a line of various divisions and departments.
The document that gets to a political principal is almost a final draft, and has certainly been checked extensively.
The fact that this entire line missed such glaring plagiarism means that the entire division and department responsible for the development of the strategy is grossly incompetent and highly negligent.
In a province with the kinds of systematic and structural problems that the EC faces, this is unthinkable.
But finally, what this scandal is fundamentally about is a lack of ethical conduct on the part of officials in the EC government.
Plagiarism is not simply the deliberate theft of intellectual property.
It is a mark of complete lack of integrity, which manifests in many ways.
Failures in service delivery, corruption, maladministration and misappropriation of state resources all stem from this lack of integrity.
It is the absence of integrity that makes government officials feel no sense of shame when they squander resources meant for the poor.
And this is very evident in the Eastern Cape, a province where corruption is so endemic that no government institution is untainted.
The rate of deterioration of successive EC governments, the endemic rot, and the complete disregard for governing with integrity must really make us question whether government in this province can truly say legitimacy.
This is where the conversation must go.
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