What is the point of locking down an entire economy and infringing on citizens’ fundamental human rights? What is the point of crippling small businesses to the point of closure? What is the point? In short, the answer is to save lives – as many lives as possible.
But, if doing so opens the backdoor to even more looting of state resources, then again what is the point? In our city, the municipality seems to have bought sanitiser at massively-inflated prices – R750 per one-litre bottle – to be exact, while another contractor was paid about R117 per one-litre bottle of sanitiser.
It blows the mind that, even when unemployment is projected to rise by 30 per cent, this type of violation keeps recurring.
When the projected job losses eventually do happen, then our municipality will be in a much worse position to mitigate these losses than they are now; which is not saying much, as the municipality’s financial situation is precarious at best.
Our 2020/2021 budget has not yet been approved. The administration has failed to provide the reports as part of the condition of approval. They have yet to be served before the council.
Banning alcohol and tobacco is empowering criminal syndicates; people are not allowed to visit their families. Yet more people have been arrested for breaching of lockdown regulations than public servants, against whom there is at least a prima facie case to be made for corruption.
Issues in our municipality, like the millions paid in overtime, millions spent on telephone upgrades and hundreds of thousands spent on trips to upmarket horse races have yet to be punished. Our municipality simply ignores calls from the auditor-general and our council to hold officials accountable. It ignores council resolutions to provide documents. It is ignoring the call from President Ramaphosa to act against corruption.
So, again, what’s the point? The connected elite continues to enrich themselves while regulations set out to protect us, as citizens, turn us into either criminals or paupers.
