Daily Rant: DA becomes like all the rest
This morning I listened to Aden Thomas interviewing Ian Neilson, the Deputy Mayor of Cape Town, on Cape Talk. The interview was about what Eyewitness News is calling the IRT costing “bungle”. The use of the word bungle confuses me. Mixing up your medications and taking the pink pills instead of the yellow ones is a bungle. Wearing one white sock and one black one is a bungle. Spending R4.1 billion instead of R1.3 billion? That’s not a bungle. That’s a screwup of gargantuan proportions. It’s very, very big.
If that happened in any other city the Democratic Alliance would have come out guns blazing, smoking the airwaves demanding judicial inquiries while making snide references to expensive motor cars, all coated with piety and sugary self-righteousness. But not this time round. Because this time the “bungle” was the DA’s. It happened on their watch. So instead of demanding that heads roll, we have to hear the Mayor Dan Plato come out and say “If it were not for the financial downturn we would not be in this position.” What complete and utter bungling bollocks. One of the things Neilson said in the interview this morning is that someone forgot to include the price of the busses in the project plan. Huh? How is that anything to do with the financial downturn? How is that anything other than complete dereliction of duty? With a small dose of stupidity sprinkled over the top. And why, when the chamber of highly paid councilors were reviewing the plan, did no-one stick their hand up and say “Um, guys, there aren’t any busses on here. I thought this was a bus system.” Then there was some VAT left off the budget. No-one spotted that either. And then virtually every single line item on the budget, according to Neilson, was underestimated. When Aden asked the perfectly sensible question: “Why did Council not pick this up?” Neilson did the verbal equivalent of coyly kicking his shoes through the dust and shrugging his shoulders. “We trusted the experts” he said.
Here’s the wake-up call Mr Neilson: We trust you not to trust the experts. We trust you to question them, interrogate them, fight for every line item in every budget. We trust you to ask if you don’t know something. We trust you to pick up mistakes. And above all else we trust you to come clean when something has gone wrong, and to do so before it is too late.
But here’s the most interesting thing about the story (and forgive me if I don’t get the timeline 100% right, I was driving at the time). The way I understand it is that the initial budget of R1.3 billion was approved in August last year. Shortly thereafter it became evident that things weren’t going according to plan. Investigations began. The budget was increased. But it was all pretty quiet and kept under wraps. It was then clear that even the increased budget wasn’t going to be enough. But we knew nothing about all that. Until today when the story broke that the budget had slowly ballooned to more than three times the original estimate. So why was it kept quiet? The answer is fairly self evident – 22 April 2009. Let me jog your memory – that was the day the country voted. In the course of that election, the DA won the highly contested Province, largely on a ticket of “What we have done for Cape Town we can do for the Province”. At that stage most people thought that the DA was doing an okay job in the Mother City, What would have completely scuppered their careful campaign would have been the news that what they were doing for the City was driving it deeper into debt through incompetence and bad planning. So they did what most politicians would do…they kept it quiet. And even now, after the story has broken, there is no word from Helen Zille who was Mayor of Cape Town when the plan was approved. She’s gone strangely quiet and sent her minions out to do the damage control. Accountability M’am? You were Mayor, after all.
The DA’s handling of this has been shameful and they have lost the moral high ground. Next time they encounter corruption or incompetence in another Province or in the National Parliament they are going to have to sit meekly by instead of leaping to their feet and demanding that someone gets sacked. I look forward to the day they try. And meanwhile I’ll weep for the loss of a credible opposition.
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