Online sources suggest the phrase “crime doesn’t pay” is a Victorian era term meant to encourage morality and hard work.
At its root is the suggestion that the consequence of wrongdoing should be punishment rather than profit.
It is not a phrase which enjoys any traction in the careless, incapable Eastern Cape administration or with the politicians supposedly responsible for oversight of public funds.
Here, the idea of “punishment” for wrongdoers is an oddly foreign concept.
In the unlikely event of being caught, the worst consequence seems to be redeployment to another position of power where further havoc can be wrought.
Premier Oscar Mabuyane, in reply to a written question in the legislature from the DA, revealed that the scale of financial misconduct amounted to some R5.1bn.
This included irregular, fruitless and wasteful expenditure, fraud, loss of assets, misuse of government property and financial non-disclosure.
It is an inconceivable amount of money for most average people.
If you could squeeze a million rand into one suitcase, then R1.5bn would fill 1,500 suitcases.
To give it a more concrete form, the DA suggests it could have built some 20,000 RDP houses.
Most of those responsible for this gross wastage barely paid a price.
Even in cases involving outright fraud and dishonesty, disciplinary cases limped along, sometimes for years.
And the outcomes of these hearings seldom appeared to fit the extent of the financial misconduct.
The premier conceded that 187 cases linked to R908.9m had resulted only in warning letters.
Some 52 cases linked to R3.266bn were condoned, and in 119 cases involving R330.7m the result was dismissal.
SA has an exceptionally good legal framework for the management of public money.
The Public Finance Management Act recognises that funds gathered via the country’s tiny tax base (Sars says about 1.5% of the population pays 60.9% of all personal income tax) is a precious and finite resource.
If found guilty, they can be heavily fined or face imprisonment of up to five years
Financial misconduct is considered by that Act as serious and it spells out in detail procedures for disciplining those guilty of it.
Gross financial misconduct should result in criminal prosecution.
The criminality is not just focused on accounting officers’ “wilful” failure to comply with laws on good governance but also their “gross negligence” in failing to do so.
If found guilty, they can be heavily fined or face imprisonment of up to five years.
In the Eastern Cape, they would most likely get off with a warning letter after being on suspension with full pay for two years.
This is not consequence management but gross ineptitude and it happened on Mabuyane’s watch.
He needs to clean up his administration’s act so that those guilty of failing the province’s residents pay the appropriate price.
Daily Dispatch
