JUSTICE MALALA | Ask yourselves, SA politicos, why is someone else doing your work?

We need to wean our politicians off the idea that sitting in a meeting and gabbing away is work. It’s not. Let me explain.

Every week now one is inundated with press releases and social media posts by from them announcing they held a meeting on this or that pressing issue. They want citizens to applaud them for holding a meeting about load-shedding while those same citizens are sitting in the dark. They want young people to applaud them for convening a think-tank on the economy while the same youths are out on the streets.

I’ve never heard of Gift of the Givers boasting about holding a meeting. Yet I see the organisation’s work everywhere.

Three weeks ago Gauteng politicians and public servants held meetings and then rushed out to announce that the provincial health department had granted Gift of the Givers permission to drill boreholes at the Helen Joseph and Rahima Moosa Mother and Child hospitals. I know we are inured to outrages, but this is depressing: these “servants of the people” were giving an NGO “permission” to do their jobs for them! They did not display any shame that these hospitals had gone for weeks, thanks to their failure, without adequate water. Worse, they did not feel embarrassed that despite the taxpayer giving them billions of rand to provide water to hospitals, they had failed to do so.

Last week the premier of Gauteng, David Makhura, tweeted: “Yesterday, Wednesday, 23 June, the Executive Council, in a special meeting, took a decision to give a go ahead to the Charlotte Maxeke Academic Hospital management to reopen the parts of the hospital that have not been structurally affected by the fire.”

He was telling us they sat in a meeting. Why did they have to have a useless meeting to do what is obvious: reopen the hospital? Surely, surely, it has been obvious for weeks that extraordinary measures must be taken to fix the facility after it was gutted by fire? Surely hospital management has been working on this for weeks? The announcement should have been made weeks ago and should have read: “The hospital has been reopened.”

Simple.

Makhura’s administration was last week tweeting charts about “predictions for the third wave” by the Premier’s Advisory Committee on Covid-19. This same administration had not acted on the advice of professionals, given months ago, that a third wave was looming and hospitals needed to be ready. This is an administration that is as delusional as a Piet Rampedi.

When our politicians go home what do they reflect on? Do they say this is how it’s done? We must face this dirty little open secret: the work of government at all levels is being done by private business, NGOs and ordinary citizens. Politicians, meanwhile, seem to be in the news for all the wrong reasons: stealing taxpayers’ money, marching recklessly during a pandemic or acting without accountability.

No-one seems to be asking themselves why their work is being done by others. What is frightening is that this is happening across the country at local level.

Remember the Kgetleng Local Municipality? The high court in Mahikeng found it had failed to deliver water and sanitation to Koster and Swartruggens in North West for years and so gave residents’ associations permission to take over. They had the water running in less than a week.

The story of all talk and no action can also be found in Makhanda in the Eastern Cape, in Emfuleni in Gauteng and in many other parts of the country. Wherever you look, politicians talk, yet cannot seem to deliver on their obligations.

We are a people obsessed with the idea of being seen to do something and talking loudly about it rather than actually doing it. The numerous portfolio committees go to municipalities on “site visits” and leave without achieving anything. Things fall apart while we are in meetings.

Last week the newish auditor-general, Tsakani Maluleke, told a joint meeting of parliament’s standing committee on public accounts (Scopa) and the standing committee on the auditor-general that 246 municipalities had incurred irregular expenditure of R26bn. She said a mere 27 municipalities out of 257 received clean audits for the 2019/2020 financial year. My question is this: what are the two parliamentary committees going to do about this? Will you see or hear of one head, just one, rolling? No, you won’t. Instead, you will most likely hear your parliamentarians boasting that they conducted a site visit to a municipality, enjoyed chicken drumsticks and left the area — never to be seen again.

They believe meetings are work, you see. And that’s the problem. We don’t do the work. We just talk about it. We are a nation of hustlers, not workers.