Who cares when you can use O.P.M. to buy Nando’s?

With all the legislation in place to ensure no one nicks from the municipal treasurer, here and elsewhere, it is amazing that municipalities still manage to get away with (literally) murder.
There are scorecards for managers, performance checks, dashboard reports from the auditor general and a bewildering range of other legislation to comply with. The red tape has generated a whole new red tape. There are independent auditing committees to oversee the doings of the Ewings – as we used to say when Dallas still enthralled us every Tuesday evening.
Yet, despite all these good intentions, municipalities continue to be a playground for politicians and the politically connected.
In Endumeni, we make the chairman of the auditing committee a manager of something or other within the Kremlin. Other so-called comrades are shoe-horned into jobs they may or may not be qualified for. So what about the plethora of rules and committees that supposed to stop any perceived unfairness? Well, as someone who is not famous once said “the law is not for the lawless”. Rules are easily bent or simply broken to serve political patronage. Which is fine, of course, if it suits you but not so nice when all you want is that matchbox house the ruling party promised you 20 years ago. But as someone else – who is equally unknown – said, ‘as long as you can spend R50 000 of public money on Nandos chicken without fear of reprisals, you are on the winning side’.
This is known as O.P.M. – other people’s money which you can have a ball with.
When you use O.P.M the little matter of exorbitant legal costs do not matter. So if you make a mistake you can always get a lawyer to cover your tracks and pay them from the municipal purse. Another good idea is to suspend people for up to two years but keep on paying them over R80 000 a month which allows the suspended one to continue paying his lawyer with the money paid from the municipal treasurer. Get it?