The minister of finance has the province's slippery reptiles in his sights

WINNING political office should not be confused with winning the Lotto. But in South Africa it often is.

The problem is, some of our politicians behave like country bumpkins who suddenly find they've won Powerball - they go large.

Forgetting that they're not in office, be it political or administrative, to behave like MC Hammer in his heyday; that the money is entrusted to them by the people of the republic. The funds are supposed to be spent on the provision of education, health, housing and so on.

And that brings me neatly to Limpopo. Where the gravy train is about to be derailed by an inquisitive minister of finance. Aaah, Limpopo. It used to be just the name of a river and a province.

Now "Limpopo" means so much more. It means corruption, mismanagement and fraud on a grand scale.

It may also be turned into a verb: "let's Limpopo the tender process" or "the entire country was Limpopoed".

Limpopo represents the worst-case scenario for the Republic of South Africa. Those of us in other provinces shake our heads and whisper "there but for the grace of Nkosi ..."

While it may well be true that Mpumalanga province wrote the book on corruption at provincial level, I would argue that Limpopo not only studied it very closely, it improved on the model.

What we have here is version 4.0iS of the big con. It's the sports version. The cronies get richer much quicker.

It goes a little something like this:

• First you get the political power;
• Then you get to award the tender (better if the tender is bent from the beginning, that way nobody has any expectation other than chowing taxpayers' money);
• Then you/your cronies win the tender;
• Then you/your cronies under-deliver on the tender;
• Then you/your cronies in the provincial departments overpay for the tender; and
• You can do all this without having to provide any supporting documentation or tangible proof of having delivered anything.

Limpopo's crocodile-infested political and business nexus has brought the province to its knees. Cleaning up the mess will be no easy task.

It is complicated by the fact that national Treasury staff on the ground face real hostility, and even danger.

For that reason they are provided with armed police escorts.

To put it simply, the Treasury's intervention threatens to rob the crocodiles of the easy meat they've been enjoying.

Taxpayers and the people of Limpopo have been helpless deer snatched off the river-bank by the big powerful, politically connected crocs. They are the apex predators in this particular environment.

The minister of finance may not have the looks of a swashbuckling hero, but he's just gone crocodile hunting!

And he's taken along a rather large Bowie knife - there will be criminal investigations alongside the forensic auditing of the books up north - to skin some crocs.

Pravin Gordhan and his team will be turning many of those crocs into nifty handbags, belts and shoes.

Much is being made of the alleged political agenda behind the cabinet decision to effectively place Limpopo under administration.

Premier Cassel Mathale's apologists say he's getting it in the neck because he is a Julius Malema backer. Hmm, nice try.

The facts, as spelt out by Gordhan, are that the "province has been spending beyond its means". Accumulated unauthorised expenditure had grown from R1.5-billion in 2009 to R2.7-billion 2011.

"In recent times the province was paying certain service providers eight times in a month.

"The frequency of payments did not provide for an opportunity for proper verification, nor did it permit proper management of cash," he said.

"Expenditure reporting was shown not to be credible. Supply chain management processes were generally not in line with legal requirements," Gordhan added.

Simply put, the province was spending more than it had and could not account for what it spent the money on. Hints of illegality are everywhere.

People, money and common sense have been treated with disdain.

Limpopo's financial controls were weaker than those of Greece, Spain and Italy.

We should hold ourselves to a higher standard than the European Union, surely?

Limpopo is our very own Costa Concordia.

The ship's been run aground by fools.