Traipsing around Turin as scholars left high and dry

Please don’t tell me that SA has no money. Or that it is a poor country. Or that it needs to increase the rate of VAT to plug the massive debt hole it has created.

Please don’t tell me these things because I will blow my top. 

SA has money aplenty. What SA does not have is courageous leadership.

It does not have leaders who have the courage to rein in its spendthrift politicians.

It doesn’t have leaders with the courage to say we must tighten our belts and that begins with politicians tightening theirs. 

Here is an example. Last week the North West province’s education MEC, Viola Motsumi, was supposed to appear before an SA Human Rights Commission (SAHRC) inquiry into scholar transport “challenges”.

Don’t let that word “challenges” divert you from the truth, dear reader.

It means pupils’ lives are in danger because children in poor rural communities are being transported, or not even being transported, to schools in buses that are often late, unroadworthy or even unregistered. 

Motsumi, who was supposed to present to the SAHRC on this truly important matter, did not attend because she was in Italy. Nice.

She was there for the Special Olympics World Winter Games in the city of Turin.

According to the games’ website, SA had six athletes competing in figure skating and short-track speedskating. 

Other sporting codes on the roster include Alpine skiing, cross-country skiing, snowboarding, floorball and snowshoeing. 

Motsumi then explained that she and her team (yes, she didn’t travel alone) went to Italy “to support the Special Olympics World Winter Games and to gain expertise of hosting a world class National Special Olympic Games in the North West province next year”.

You can see the MEC explain it all here.

The problem is that if you scratch under the surface you really do begin to wonder. 

First, Motsumi was with at least two other members of her team.

Then we learn that she was accompanied by Virginia Tsotso Tlhapi, the MEC for arts, culture, sports and recreation of the North West.

Surely this MEC, being the lead politician on matters such as Special Olympics, would have brought two or more “team members” along as well?

So, we had at least six politicians from the rather arid North West traipsing around wintry Turin, Italy, learning how to prepare for our own National Special Olympic Games.

I’ve only counted six government representatives here, but we probably had more, which means that there were likely more SA politicians and their teams than athletes at the event.

How essential was this travel? Was one team (from sports and recreation) not enough? 

It may seem like a small thing but let me tell you this: that’s how the rot started and that’s how we have got to where we are today.

There was absolutely no need for Motsumi, whose education department has failed to deal with scholar transport to the extent that the SAHRC is now involved, to have taken the trip.

It was what government used to call “wasteful expenditure” in the 2000s. Now it is called “normal”.

Imagine what savings SA could achieve if finance minister Enoch Godongwana had the courage to ban all travel such as Motsumi’s until we have significantly reduced our national debt.

Imagine what could be saved if we addressed the billions that are lost to “irregular and wasteful” expenditure flagged by the auditor-general every year. 

None of this will happen. 

At the weekend it was reported that members of parliament’s portfolio committee on electricity and energy were shocked by a presentation on the National Solar Water Heater Programme. 

“The programme, designed to install five-million solar water heaters in households by 2030, has instead become a symbol of mismanagement and waste.

“Over six years, solar geysers meant for low-income households sat unused in storage, racking up R325m in fruitless and wasteful expenditure — and no-one has been held accountable,” the Daily Maverick wrote.

“As a team, the project is a total failure,” Thabo Kekana, deputy director-general for programmes and projects at the department of mineral resources & energy, said. 

The people who do nothing about this, and have done nothing about it for 16 years, are the same leaders who want poor South Africans to pay higher VAT and other taxes.

They are the same people who insist that SA is broke even though they are the ones responsible for making SA broke and poor in the first place. 

SA’s problem is its spineless leaders. So long as voters do not hold them accountable, SA will continue to be poor and hungry while they gorge themselves on delicious Vitello Tonato in Turin. 

* The six athletes of the Special Olympics SA National Team will return to SA on Monday at 9.30am.

Go meet these heroes at the OR Tambo International Airport to celebrate them.