Compel beneficiaries of public funds to pay up

Once in a while, we are treated to a working system, albeit not within our own borders. Down south, President Jacob Zuma has, after persistent pressure from Opposition Party the EFF, finally agreed to pay back some spent on renovations to his private homestead.

The scandal has been brewing since 2009 when taxpayer money was used for what was supposed to be security upgrades to Zuma’s Nkandla home. In an all too familiar script on this continent, the budget spiraled out of control.

Unlike many countries though, the fact that Zuma is president has not prevented the South African Office of Public Protector from investigating and concluding the case with tangible results.

The report on the matter made it clear that items in the homestead such as the cattle kraal, the chicken run, a swimming pool (ostensibly for firefighting), the visitors’ centre and the amphitheatre had nothing to do with security considerations for the President but only served to benefit his personal property. It recommended that Zuma pay back money spent on those items.

Predictably, a government probe had found Zuma “not guilty of any wrong doing”.

Yet as the independent Public Protector office would later find, “The President tacitly accepted the implementation of all measures at his residence and unduly benefited from the enormous capital investment in the non-security installations at his private residence’’ It added that at no point did Zuma express misgivings at its scale or opulence even though the construction would have raised the eyebrows of a “reasonable person”.

When news of the security upgrade first broke in late 2009 in the media, the cost was estimated at $6.1 million (Sh610 million). However, despite intense public scrutiny, the bill ballooned to $23 million (Sh2.3 billion) as the project and its costs spiraled out of control.

In an intriguing pattern it turns out that Zuma’s home security upgrades exceeded the budgets of four former presidents put together. PW Botha spent $16,100 (Sh1.6 million), FW de Klerk spent $22,000 (Sh2.2 million), Nelson Mandela: $2.9 million (Sh290 million) on two residences, and Thabo Mbeki $1.1 million (Sh110 million) compared to Zuma’s $23 million (2.3 billion).

As such, spending on Zuma’s private residence was more than 1,000 times that was spent on FW de Klerk, the white president who stepped down in 1994 after the first all-race elections that signaled the end of apartheid and eight times the estimated present-day value of securing the home of Nelson Mandela.

The report titled “Secure in Comfort”, said public works funds had to be diverted from inner-city regeneration projects to carry out the upgrade on Zuma’s home. “While villagers do not have access to electricity or running water, the project shows “opulence on a grand scale it leaves one with the impression of excessive and unconscionable ‘Rolls Royce’ security constituting an island in a sea of poverty and paucity of public infrastructure”.

Ours will be a much better country when an example is set once and for all that even those who are in power can be brought to account.

For now, being in power in Kenya is a guarantee to the unfettered right to grab and develop public school playgrounds. What’s more, even when the damning evidence is there for all to see you will not see an admission of guilt or a scathing report from our anti-corruption agencies and nothing of the sort of embarrassment that has befallen President Jacob Zuma can ever come to pass.

Months later, our so called anti-corruption agency will be eagerly waiting in the wings to give you or your potential employer an unsolicited clean bill of health, to remove any technical hindrance there may be to your assuming or resuming public office to ostensibly continue your run on the public purse. We indeed are a peculiar lot.