Hogarth: 18 December 2011

Hogarth does not suffer fools lightly and is compulsive reading for the millions of South Africans who share this intolerance.

'Tis the season to hide the wasteful expenditure

ANYBODY who has been in a mall over the last few weeks knows how easily that planned prudent purchase can turn into a wallet-eating monster.

To mark the season of profligacy, Hogarth would like to honour those in the government who just had to lash out with the official credit card.

A good catalogue of bad spending has been provided by the DA chief whip, Watty Watson, who revealed that the government had filed 327 replies to questions very late in the year, perhaps hoping they "would go undiscovered until the holiday season begins in earnest".

Among the most fruitless, wasteful and plainly absurd expenditures was more than R800000 spent by the Department of Public Works to try to spin doctor minister Gwen Mahlangu-Nkabinde out of the police lease scandal.

Not even 27 communications professionals described as being of "depth, capacity and capability" could save this Humpty Dumpty.

The empty luxury mansions ...

THE same department ridiculed above also spent R14-million "on four ministerial mansions that nobody lives in", Watson pointed out. Well at least this goes some way to explaining all those very expensive hotel stays, which have become the habit of ministers in the recent past.

... and the full five-star hotels

HERE'S a prime example. One of the "last-minute-dot-com" replies revealed that the Department of Public Enterprises spent R461000 on hotel stays.

Said Watson: "This includes a 17-day stay at the Sheraton Hotel (five star) in Pretoria for R130000, even though the minister has an official residence in Pretoria."

Getting to and from these luxury residences also costs serious money. According to one of the replies, minister Malusi Gigaba and his deputy spent more than R1-million on flights during the 2010/2011 financial year.

The high cost of boring copy

THEN there are those little things that end up costing a lot of money. In Watson's catalogue of Christmas replies is one revealing that "the National Treasury spent R2.7-million on annual reports". A little worrying, considering that they remained the dullest reading material in the republic.

And then there was the R4.57-million spent on furniture for ministers and deputy ministers since April 2009. That's a lot of very expensive gomma gommas.

Farewell to a barbed tongue

HOGARTH pays tribute to Christopher Hitchens, who died this week after a life of speaking his mind.

Here are some barbed lines he wrote about those he held in low regard, courtesy of Slate.com:

HENRY KISSINGER:

"Henry Kissinger should have the door shut in his face by every decent person and should be shamed, ostracised, and excluded. No more dinners in his honour; no more respectful audiences for his absurdly overpriced public appearances; no more smirking photographs with hostesses and celebrities."

MEL GIBSON:

"We live in a culture where the terms fascist and racist are thrown about, if anything, too easily and too frequently. Yet here is a man whose every word and deed is easily explicable once you know the single essential thing about him: he is a member of a fascist splinter group that believes it is the salvation of the Catholic Church."

HILLARY CLINTON:

"Senator Clinton now has the obscene urge to claim the raped and slaughtered people of Bosnia as if their misery and death were somehow to be credited to her account! Words begin to fail one at this point. Is there no such thing as shame?"

MICHAEL MOORE

"To describe this film [Fahrenheit 9/11] as dishonest and demagogic would almost be to promote those terms to the level of respectability. To describe this film as a piece of crap would be to run the risk of a discourse that would never again rise above the excremental." Well said, sir.

• Write to hogarth@sundaytimes.co.za