THE Mail & Guardian today breaks another story pointing to possible corruption in government – this time involving the Department of Housing and a R185-million housing contract.
The scandal worries us on two levels. The first and obvious one is the reputation that the “new” South Africa is beginning to earn itself for administrative corruption. From Allan Boesak, to unresolved issues surrounding the Sarafina II debacle, to the Independent Broadcasting Authority (IBA), to the Mpumalanga driving-licence scam, the impression is being created that the country is sliding down the same slippery slope which has led other countries in Africa to poverty and perdition.
At the very least, the new South Africa is in danger of sinking into the same moral turpitude as the old South Africa where corruption was rife and largely hidden.
The slur is perhaps unmerited. Often – as in the instance of Sarafina and the IBA – the problem is not criminal, but a product of naivety born of a lack of experience. But whatever the factors responsible, we have to face up to the realisation that the image is being created. And that can only damage us abroad, among potential investors, and at home, where such an example set by the ruling elite will encourage disrespect for rules and law by ordinary people.
“If they can get away with it, why can’t we?” is a cry that will only encourage the drift to pandemic criminality.
It is deeply unfortunate that the whistle- blowers – those who have had the courage to take a stand against abuse of public money and position – are the ones who are being punished.
Our other concern is race. Too often when those in positions of power get into a tight corner in the new South Africa they play the racial card. A classic, if pathetic, example – recounted in the Krisjan Lemmer column elsewhere on this page – is provided by an adviser to the minister of mineral and energy affairs when challenged about the outcome of an auditor’s inquiry into the Strategic Fuel Fund.
Questioned about the competency of the firm of auditors – believed to be new to the complexities of the oil business – the minister’s adviser replied, outrageously: “Eight black CAs, accountants: unqualified? If this is not racism on your part, what is?” We neither knew of nor cared about the racial identity of the auditors. But the official instinctively seized on the weapon of racial abuse to avoid answering the questions.
The relevance of this to the housing scandal is that the story pits a white and a black against one another. Billy Cobbett, the former director general of housing who has been fired, has not got one iota of racial prejudice in his make-up. He was personally appointed to that post by Joe Slovo in a decisive move aimed at pre- empting what was regarded as a racist “old guard” entrenched in the department.
Nevertheless the temptation will be for those accused of wrongdoing to play the race card. It is, perhaps, unavoidable that the concept of race has survived the repeal of the Population Registration Act. It is self-evidently necessary to recognise racial identities in the new South Africa to deal with the legacies of racial injustice in the old.
Our commitment, however, must be to the creation of a non-racial national identity. Let us, by all means, be on our guard for racial prejudice, whether it be nursed by the “bittereinders” of the lunatic right, or lurk in the subconscious of the liberated left.
But let us recognise that those who cry “race” for their own selfish reasons are the enemies of our society, working to polarise our people. They undermine a national dream which has been conjured into reality by a black man and is shared by men and women of goodwill, of whatever race.