In the week that Bophuthatswana’s former president Lucas Mangope went on trial for fraud and theft, John Seiler argues for effective financial management to prevent corruption
Another R25-million stolen in the apartheid-era Bophuthatswana has been revealed by the auditor general’s office.
A report issued last week refers to a R19,5-million payment which the South African government intended between 1989 and 1994 for the Winterveld Development Programme (to upgrade living conditions), but which never arrived in the appropriate account.
In addition, R5-million was debited against the homeland paymaster general’s account in 1990 as “sundry” matters – but was transferred as “professional fees” to an account in a French bank in the name of a homeland cabinet minister who is not identified in the report.
The revelations expose a little bit more of what was hidden in Bophuthatswana. But even then these are cases only of personal corruption, which arise almost coincidentally in the examination of documents and rarely from personal depositions.
Few former homeland officials or politicians have any motive to tell of what was reputedly widespread corruption, perhaps because so many of them shared in its largesse.
Nowhere – not in the North-West, in the Mmabatho office of the attorney general, in the office of serious economic offences, nor in the auditor general’s office – are there, even taken together, enough people and budgets to move beyond such occasional finds and to pursue them to cases substantial enough for prosecution.
Cracking the hidden network of political corruption, in which then president Lucas Mangope was more often used than directing, and in which Cabinet minister Rowan Cronje and his contacts in South African security agencies played pivotal roles, seems altogether implausible in this era of ambiguous mutual accommodation in South Africa’s political life.
So if the crooks cannot be caught what does it add up to? Are there any grounds for optimism about the financial management dimensions of governance in Bophuthatswana’s successor authority, the North-West?
And given the continued political reflex to blame the shortcomings of present government on apartheid, how much of North- West’s continuing difficulties in financial administration can be attributed to its inheritance from the Bophuthatswana administration?
The most to be hoped for is creation of a climate and procedures that make personal corruption less attractive. Northern Province Premier Popo Molefe, and his Director General Job Makgoro, have set standards for probity in their own behaviour and quick (if not always publicised) responses to alleged malfeasance within the provincial administration.
Over time, as Mangope-era civil servants retire or die, new entrants may become converts to the ideals of honest, effective, delivery-oriented governance that the premier, the director general and most senior politicians and officials in the provincial government now subscribe to.
That said, the procedures of financial management remain woefully incomplete. Of course, Molefe is right to insist that he inherited a mess. No departmental accounts had been sorted out for at least the three years prior to Mangope’s forced departure in March 1994.
From the latest auditor general’s report, it seems that little progress has been made in this pursuit and that little is possible, given the retirement of senior homeland officials and the disappearance or non-existence of pertinent documents.
What is far more worrisome is that these basic problems of non-existent audit trails and timely reports (the things that auditors get passionate about) did not change materially in the province’s first two fiscal years ending March 31 1996.
There is a partial explanation for the first year, ending on March 31 1995: because the national government insisted that all provinces go through a laborious, time-consuming and expensive process of justifying their structural changes and new appointments, it was only early in 1995 that the new top management of the finance department came to work in Mmabatho.
Thus, they could have had no significant impact on the provincial government’s financial management procedures in the fiscal year, 1994/1995, which was, in fact, under a Budget largely set by the Mangope regime before its departure.
But another auditor general report, issued in May this year, made clear that the procedural shortcomings continued through the next year, to April 1 1996.
The press and the SABC misled the public by focusing on “dramatic” unauthorised expenditures described in the report, which Molefe more or less rightly (and certainly, righteously) insisted were nothing illegal and in some instances owing to burdens put on his government by Pretoria.
In fact, however, the heart of the May report was a long list of prosaic failures in financial management, much like those reported in last week’s report about the earlier homeland regime.
But is there any basis for judgment about these continuing shortcomings in financial management? The May report hinted that some aspects of financial management were working satisfactorily, but it noted that auditors’ reports inevitably stressed problems and failures.
Nonetheless, despite the value of adhering to international auditing standards and practices, the report should have described the achievements in provincial financial management.
Is it naive to hope that the media might turn its attention to these esoteric, but pivotal, issues of effective financial management by our provincial and national governments?
If they turn away from the scare-mongering headlines about chaos and collapse which are the sub-editorial fodder for all stories emanating from the auditor general’s office, perhaps the governments will give up their defensive reflexes to these stories and instead share with the public their own sense of progress and continuing difficulties in the prosaic business of financial management.
— Dr John Seiler is a political scientist and author of Transforming Mangope’s Bophuthatswana, chapters of which are on the M&G Web site (http://www.mg.co.za/mg)