Study tours to exotic locations seem to have become a national pastime for minor government officials at all levels. What exactly they bring to the country’s citizens by way of better service delivery in education, health, crime-fighting and residential essentials is increasingly difficult to make out.
The recent million-rand ”study tour” to Russia, China, Vietnam and India by Johannesburg mayor Amos Masondo and his merry band of 20 municipal executives ”may yield very good results”, he said, defending the tour. ”It was no holiday,” Masondo said.
One can only hope that they returned enlightened as to the ways of the countries they visited. Masondo said they went to learn more about service delivery, among other things, in the four countries. Maybe he’s referring to the fact that in China and Vietnam, corrupt and thieving officials are simply put against the wall and shot.
Nobody is suggesting a similar solution for South Africa, of course. We’d be left with half our premiers, mayors, councillors and civil service bigwigs overnight.
Actually, China is trying hard to cut down on death sentences. Some academic sources in China put the average execution rate at 8Â 000 a year. The state won’t release official figures. ”They are just too high,” said Professor Way Shizhou of Peking University.
Masondo and his team might have been heartened that China has already lifted the death penalty on smaller economic crimes. But, warned Supreme People’s Court president Xiao Yang, people guilty of ”serious crimes like corruption and bribery” will still be put to death.
Amoral officials who commit lesser crimes, such as pocketing or wasting government money or obstructing public works, will simply go to jail for up to 20 years.
Also, China hates waste. So it has introduced ”execution vans” that drive around the countryside and put condemned miscreants to death by lethal injection so that after execution state paramedics can harvest the deceased’s organs.
Masondo said China’s economy is ”growing at an amazing rate”. Maybe the team found out why. The average working day is 10 hours. The average working week is six days. Senior public servants are paid roughly half of what they earn here. The highest-level civil clerk (known here in blingland as a chief director) gets about R18Â 000 a month, which is the highest by far of all four countries. Further, you don’t get even a minor post in government unless you’ve undergone one of the many intensive training courses for civil servants and sat and passed the stringent examinations.
As a result, most public servants actually know how to do, and do, the jobs they are paid to do. Study tours around the world are not on the list of duties.
Russia, Vietnam and India have similar requirements for public service jobs, except that public servants are paid even less. The average monthly pay for a senior professional in government service is about R4Â 500 a month.
Actual incompetence on the job in all four countries is surprisingly low, mainly because incompetent people are not appointed to the job in the first place, no matter whose uncle, cousin, brother or sister they are.
Execution for economic crimes is still in force, except for Russia where there is a moratorium on the death sentence. The lives of corrupt mayors and other councillors are mercifully spared. Instead they are sent to Siberian labour camps for up to 20 years, which in the end amounts to the same thing.
Russia, by the way, has the highest economic crime rate in the world. According to a survey this year by PricewaterhouseCoopers (PWC), 82,5% of companies and institutions reported employee theft and extortion by officials. Kenya and South Africa were next on PWC’s list at 67% and 62% respectively. The global average is 30%.
In the Socialist Republic of Vietnam the death penalty is still in force for economic crimes, such as fraud, embezzlement and bribery. Economic crimes are considered to be as dangerous to society as drug dealing. Death is by firing squad, though Vietnam is proposing to switch to lethal injection. How many civil servants are shot every year is a ”state secret”.
Ho Chi Minh City (with which Masondo signed a letter of understanding) found director Duong Quang Tri and his wife guilty of VAT fraud involving a government agricultural agency in 2005. Duang was sentence to execution by firing squad and his wife sent to prison for 16 years. Whether his automatic appeal was successful is not publicly known, but Amnesty International says such appeals rarely succeed; and it notes that Vietnam is considering doing away with capital punishment for most economic crimes in favour of life imprisonment.
India, though it still has capital punishment, does not end the lives of corrupt government officials at the end of a rope. That is reserved for killers and rapists of children. But the legislators have introduced an interesting punishment for pilferers of the public purse. This takes the form of reductions in salaries and pensions. The reduction can be up to 10% over a period of five years or more. Even pensions can be cut by up to 12%.
This system not only punishes the erring official but puts some of the purloined money back where it belongs. Perhaps Masondo will introduce the system to the Johannesburg Metro. On the other hand, perhaps he won’t.
The choice of three communist countries with some of the most undemocratic and repressive governments in the world seems a strange choice for a study tour by a democratic mayor and council.
If the council really wanted to learn about efficient service delivery, all it needed to do was take a trip to Cape Town. And if it really wants to help the people of Johannesburg, councillors could have taken a 10-day tour in their BMWs and Mercs around the less prosperous townships and settlements of Johannesburg. They would have learned a hell of a lot more than they did in Moscow or Shanghai.
The most puzzling aspect of the whole tour, though, is how the mayoral committee approved the tour when the city is owed R2,8-billion (which it wrote off), can’t pay even the most humble of its suppliers, cannot keep the hospitals running properly and has been forced to cut its budget by more than R1-billion. Masondo claims that the decision was made when ”the recession was almost ending”.
But, as with the R45-million it is somehow finding for the Miss World festival of fun and froth, mayoral committee member Oupa Monareng’s likely-to-be-immortal words possibly sum up the present council’s entire attitude towards expenditure: ”The value cannot be quantified in rands and cents.”
When the entire council doesn’t get a salary next year for six months, perhaps the mayoral committee will remember his words. They can always migrate to Ho Chi Minh City.
Peter Schafer is a journalist and commentator who has been covering Southern African politics since the 1960s
