TOM EATON | Go figure: sometimes cash leaks are big enough to be the elephant in the room

Imagine a small suitcase, the generic sort of lump you might trundle behind you through an airport or throw into the boot of your car. Now imagine that it is stuffed full of crisp, orange R200 banknotes. Ten thousand in all. R2m.

Imagine that this is your entire stash for the year. It looks like a lot. Feels like a lot, even — that bag weighs about 10 kgs — but you’re not exactly flush.

A couple of hundred thousand will go into your business, which is on its last legs. You’ve got kids in school and university, so that’s R400,000 already spent. Health care is north of R200,000, and there’s security for you and the business which is that much again. You’re also socking away about R300,000 a year for pensions. And because you’ve been living beyond your means for years, you pay about 200k in interest on your various loans. And those are just the big-ticket items.

So when a journalist runs up to and accuses you of spending R28m on advertising the proposed National Health Insurance, and asks you why Khumbudzo Ntshavheni is still in your cabinet when she allegedly granted a dodgy municipal tender worth R2.5m in 2009, you don’t know how you’re supposed to react.

That inability to understand big numbers — or the systems in which they operate — is now being exploited fairly spectacularly by the double act of Donald Trump and Elon Musk (Mump?)

I mean, how does a person like you even spend R30.5m when all you have is R200 notes? And why would anyone care?

I don’t want to make light of government waste or corruption. Every cent of that R28m — representing the roughly R2-trillion that will be allocated if and when the budged is finally approved — must be accounted for. The people demanding answers over the R28m spent on advertising the NHI, or that R2.5m tender, must keep digging.

But I think it’s sometimes worth remembering that, for people who have spent years working with hundreds of billions, mere millions must start to feel like literal pocket change.

Of course, they don’t feel that way to us, but without wanting to victim-blame, that might be part of the problem, too: we may be keenly aware of the cost of rent or groceries or electricity, but once the numbers start climbing into the millions and billions, our inner accountants lose track and simply give up.

It’s why I asked you imagine that suitcase: almost nobody can visualise R2-trillion. It’s also why ActionSA has condemned the R140m spent on travel by the GNU over the last six months: R140m on flights and hotels feels like skulduggery, but R230bn spent on servicing debt, or a public wage bill that is around three-quarters of a trillion rand, feels like astrophysics — less an asteroid hurtling towards your house than a gas cloud lurking incalculably far away.

That inability to understand big numbers — or the systems in which they operate — is now being exploited fairly spectacularly by the double act of Donald Trump and Elon Musk (Mump?) who have used justifiable concerns about governmental profligacy to convince millions of Americans that their financial discomfort is because of liberals giving away their hard-earned dollars to diabolical science projects, like $33m (R607.2m) allegedly spent on “transgender monkeys” and $2.7m (R49.7m) spent to put “cats on treadmills”.

When Musk amplified these and other claims on X late last year, the truth quickly came out: the first figure had conflated a monkey laboratory and a study examining if feminising hormones made recipients more susceptible to HIV; the second was research into treatments for human spinal cord injuries. But the idea had taken hold, and these fantasies of deranged liberals wrecking the US economy with their cripplingly expensive dark magic have been supplemented by scores of others since then.

Over the weekend, Trump added to the catalogue. Repeating his view that the US was at its wealthiest and most glorious between 1870 and 1913 (entirely coincidentally the dates between which the rich paid almost no income tax and child labour flourished), Trump told his audience why the country wasn’t as rich any more.

“Of course now we give it away to transgender,” he said. “Transgender this, transgender that — everybody gets a transgender operation ... Now we give it away to crazy things.”

It was a beautifully clear explanation: the reason MAGA voters don’t live like Mump isn’t the outsourcing of manufacturing jobs to China, or stagnating wages, or the criminal cost of health care, or systemic tax avoidance of the rich via legislation and tax havens, or a shortage of housing keeping prices in permanent bubble territory. The reason is the 10,000 Americans who get gender-affirming surgery every year.

Cats on treadmills. Transgender monkeys. Millions, perhaps a billion, or ten billion. Clear targets with numbers small enough to comprehend, to keep voters safe from the mathematical fact that the only way Musk delivers on his promise to cut the US budget by $2-trillion (R36.80-trillion) and not touch social security or health care is to dissolve the state, including the total dissolution of the military. In other words, it’s a con.

Thankfully, we are not there yet: the relatively small numbers we fret about are part of a bigger picture of waste and corruption, and when ActionSA makes a stink about that R140m, it is still pulling in the right direction.

It is the vast numbers, however, looming high over the theatre of blame, with its comprehensible numbers and accessible scandals, that will decide our fate.

And so far we seem to be ignoring them as blithely as an ANC minister.