Calling for accountability for Covid-related corruption recently, several prominent civil society organisations observed: Corruption. It makes us sick!
Certainly, it makes us sicker: a great chunk of procurement monies meant for the purchase of personal protective equipment (PPE), food and Covid-necessitated goods and services is instead being used to enrich those very fortunately connected successful bidders.
But it is making us sicker in the metaphorical sense too: ratcheting up mistrust, suspicion, a fundamental dis-ease with and within our country, its body politic and the constituent parts.
And this as we face challenges that even the most cohesive society might find insurmountable. Even if you’re not venturing out much, it is hard to not catch sight of the very real increases in poverty, distress and destitution affecting our country. People are literally starving to death.
In these circumstances, it would be a heartless person indeed who wasn’t prepared to give a hearing to the government’s proposed basic income grant (Big). This would look to provide a basic level of financial support to those aged between 18 and 59. Our social support system is already providing child support, disability and old age grants and currently the Covid-initiated social relief of distress grant, which is due to expire in October.
An ANC discussion paper around the notion reportedly proposes a R500 per month grant, costing the country about R197.8bn a year, to be sourced primarily by levying additional tax on the employed.
In a recent webinar hosted by Business Day about the grant, representatives of the department of social development and Cosatu suggested this wasn’t too big an ask of those who have the means — that for the rich in SA it might mean that instead of having “three iPhones” they would need to content themselves only with two.
That, of course, is to caricature both the debate and its role players. In the context of the obscene number of reports of corruption infecting Covid-related procurement, even a heartless caricature of the well-off in SA might reasonably respond that better they enjoy their three iPhones than that additional tax monies be levied from them so that government-connected tenderpreneurs can do so.
Caricatures also won’t secure the buy-in needed if such a massive, signal project is to have any hope of being realised. It can hardly be overstated what such a comprehensive social security programme might mean for us as a country. Most obviously there would be alleviation of widespread poverty and economic distress. But the grant also holds out a potential reset for our vision and understanding of ourselves as a country and what it is we owe one another. It is a moment for a renegotiation of the fabled social contract.
Many of us without two iPhones, let alone three, would not run from the cost demanded. It isn’t just a moral question. No sensible person living in comfort can look at the extent and depth of poverty and inequality in this country and believe that this comfort is either secure or sustainable.
But we too have to be offered something of real value, a fair trade. We need not just the promise but the actual demonstration that monies contributed to the public purse will not be corruptly or profligately spent. And more than that we need the assurance that those institutions intended to provide social security to us all — the police, schools, hospitals — in reality serve all with excellence.
Only then is there a real possibility of a new contract — a Big contract — one from which we all win: a contract to strengthen and enhance the security of each of us.
• Fritz, a public interest lawyer, is CEO of Freedom Under Law.
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