Down the drain: the billions SOEs waste

The latest auditor-general (AG) report about the way our state-owned entities (SOEs) are rubbish with money makes for grim bedtime reading.

It’s bad enough that we are a “cash poor” society. There isn’t much room to mess around with money, and yet here we are — billions of rand down the drain for no discernible reason or purpose.

You know things are bad when you can’t even blame this on good old corruption. Nope, this is the seventh donkey of the apocalypse and its name is Incompetence.

In a nutshell, in case you luckily missed the report, the figures the AG presented to parliament’s standing committee on appropriations found that our SOEs and national departments have frittered away R124bn on “irregular, fruitless and wasteful expenditure” in the past five years.

Denel, that petulant Oliver Twist, wastes hundreds of millions of rand while the troops are scandalously short of helicopters and air support

The South African Post Office, SABC, Postbank and Denel between them account for R5.5bn of that.

Irregular, fruitless and wasteful expenditure, according to the National Treasury, is money that was spent uselessly and could have been saved if the big spenders concerned had demonstrated even the mildest degree of responsibility.

Beyond the fact that that money could’ve plugged so many holes in the Lucky Country’s yawning social responsibility budget, what must stick in the craw of, say, South African soldiers exposed to rebel mortar fire in the Democratic Republic of Congo is that Denel, that petulant Oliver Twist, wastes hundreds of millions of rand while the troops are scandalously short of helicopters and air support.

The water authorities have a term for the water gushing from broken pipes and illegal connections (roughly half of the water that gets pumped into Gauteng’s reticulation system alone is lost) as “nonrevenue water”. 

Say hello, then, to “nonrevenue revenue”, which sounds like something from a bad 1930s vaudeville act, but isn’t.