Govt stupidity is criminal

I'm all for paying tax. It keeps traffic lights working - mostly - and generally ensures things run and services get delivered. Until someone buys a crock story, and then the expense is wasteful, and deserves punishment.

I heard, with great amusement, the tale of the medicine woman who conned president Robert Mugabe's government out of about $1 million by claiming she could get diesel from a stone.

The story is ludicrous and proof of the saying that fact is stranger than fiction. The Zimbabwean, for any who missed this hilarious tale, found an abandoned fuel tank, filled it up and then hid it behind a rock with a conveniently placed tap, pipe and accomplice.

She must be a master of magic. After summoning government officials to the rock, she showed them how she could generate fuel from nothing, and they all raced back to inform Mugabe that the country's fuel woes were over.

I think the government delegation had rocks in their heads. Or maybe they were smoking something. Who could possibly believe such a ridiculous claim?

Which was how she was busted. Another group of officials became suspicious and the investigation uncovered the fuel tank.

I think her ingenuity should be praised! Anyone who comes up with such a hare-brained scheme, and then manages to pull it off because government is just too jolly stupid to see through it, should win a medal. Really.

Instead, she has been tried in absentia and now faces a sentence, assuming she doesn't magic herself out of the problem.

This is not the only time a government has been conned. And nor, I fear, will it be the last.

I'm a taxpayer, so simple logic dictates that I paid - in part - for these mockeries.

Nicola Mawson, group financial editor, ITWeb

Take the example of Durban's R6.5 million Web site. ITWeb is still trying to find out what could possibly have cost so much.

Running mental figures, let's say the city hired someone to manage the site. No, let's say it hired two someones. What's that over a year? R500 000? A million?

Then there is hosting. A couple hundred bucks a month should do it. And then we need servers. How much can servers possibly cost? Design, not a huge amount either.

OK, so I'll allow that the site has features that others may not have. For example, it has a live Webcam of the Moses Mabhida Stadium, the city's 2010 host venue.

It also boasts interactive postcards and image galleries, and will post content externally onto social networking platforms, like Facebook and Twitter.

At a later stage, Spanish, German and French translations will be added to the current English and Zulu offerings. Fair enough, this costs money. Apparently, quite a lot of it. One ITWebber commented that he - or she - could have done the whole thing for R250 000.

And, after viewing the site, I can't say that I was that blown away. For R6.5 million, I expect a genie to pop out of the page and wash windows.

In another example of stupid government spending, for R3 billion, I would have expected that the Gauteng government would have something, anything, to make sure classrooms are equipped with computers that cannot be easily stolen.

Instead, it seems quite happy to be fobbed off with lame duck excuses about delays and other such rubbish, such as misinformation about machines having been installed and where.

One would think that, after five years and R1 billion in wasted taxpayers' money, the Gauteng government would have wised up?

Nope. The Gauteng Shared Service Centre tendered the project again two years ago, giving it to some unknown company, with a R2 billion price tag on it.

At the moment, there doesn't even seem to be a clear idea of how many schools have exactly how many computers that are plugged into something other than electricity, such as the Internet.

Hands up if you think this is stupid expenditure.

What really gets my goat is that the Durban site and the PCs have been funded with taxpayers' money. I'm a taxpayer, so simple logic dictates that I paid - in part - for these mockeries.

I'm not even going to bang on about just how many RDP houses could have been built instead of splurging on the Internet (it's over 100 by the way). And, instead of computers, we could have had several thousand houses built.

How many families could be fed? How many roads laid, jobs created and service delivery improvements could we have seen instead of the site? And, thanks to the relatively low Internet penetration in SA, most of our soccer-mad citizens will not even be able to see it in all its glory.

No, I'm not going into all those augments. They are moot if we simply make government stupidity a crime. And lock the silly spenders away. Then money will be more wisely spent - and not on shiny blinged-up BMWs either.