TOM EATON | If only SA really were run like a spaza shop

This week, as international relations and cooperation minister Naledi Pandor admitted that her department spending R118m on a hovel in New York was “an embarrassment”, it was once again reported that MPs have accused her of running her department like a “spaza shop”. This is obviously incredibly unfair to the owners of spaza shops.

It’s also fantastically dickish of the MPs who used the analogy. Indeed, if I were Desmond Moela, an ANC MP who used the spaza analogy, and I were sitting in parliament drawing a fat paycheck from the party strangling SA’s economy to death, I like to think I wouldn’t be so callous as to mock hardworking, job-creating South Africans who, unlike my colleagues in government, know which end to hold a spoon.

Then again, perhaps Moela, being in the ANC, was speaking out of ignorance. Perhaps he doesn’t know that, unlike most ANC ministers, spaza shop owners actually understand where money comes from and how it works. Unlike Moela’s government, they know how to grow a business. And unlike Moela and his colleagues, they make their money by working hard instead of extracting taxes from the public.

I’m still not sure which I find more mindboggling: that Steinhoff thought this would look like a sensible solution, or that the NPA did.

In fact, if SA were being run like a spaza shop instead of a demented episode of Oprah ­– “You get an SOE and you get an SOE!” – it might actually be solvent.

Then again, being solvent might have deprived us of Thursday’s extraordinary story in Business Day by Rob Rose.

Hours before German prosecutors announced they were preparing fraud charges for three Steinhoff executives (still unnamed at the time of writing), Rose explained that the Hawks and NPA didn’t have enough money to keep investigating the crater left by Markus Jooste.

That is, they didn’t have enough money to keep investigating. But luckily for everyone involved, a very generous donor stepped forward and gave them a whopping R30m to continue the good work. The upstanding citizen in question? Steinhoff itself.

Rose, who literally wrote the book on the Steinhoff scandal, pointed out this was the epitome of a conflict of interests. The restraint of his understatement was admirable. Because that’s not just a conflict of interests: that’s a conflict of brain hemispheres, of entire realities.

I’m still not sure which I find more mindboggling: that Steinhoff thought this would look like a sensible solution, or that the NPA did.

But I suppose we live in a world in which our almost-bankrupt little country can buy a dumpster in New York City for R118m while ANC backbenchers condescend to people who actually work for a living. So perhaps anything’s possible.