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FOR WHOM IS THIS WINDOW DRESSING?

17/08/2017 07:58:00 By Vusi Kunene

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WHILE doing my analysis (from a lay man’s point of view) I realised that as a country we are having financial problems. What brought about that view is the failure to pay the elderly, the failure to pay medical drugs suppliers, the failure to pay for passports, the failure to provide food for school feeding schemes and the response received from those who repair the country’s roads.

When you seek assistance for the bad roads you are told that there is no fuel for the machinery. I would have suggested that we have a commission of enquiry into why are we having financial problems but I have been discouraged because there are a lot of commissions that have been conducted and we have not been told of the results and no action is taken after those commissions.

That is what led me to thinking; are these commissions established just to window dress or are they established to assist in informing our actions going forward? If we are window dressing, for whom are we doing it? Are we not wasting the little resources on these exercises? Why are the results of these commissions not made public so that we know the position? Is this secrecy not leading to people making the wrong conclusions without being informed yet the information is there?

Parliament commissioned some of its members to do a study on the benefits of dagga and this was a good move because it was going to inform the country if there are benefits of legalising dagga or not. We are told of the benefits of dagga and that we may be sitting on gold yet the country is struggling financially.
We are told of the negatives yet Parliament was trying to give us the positives rather than people using dagga as a drug. The problem though is that even before we get the results of the consultations by the MPs, Cabinet has already taken a negative stand.

Even if there were huge profits, the prime minister rubbished the consultations by saying no matter how good the positives were, dagga will not be allowed in the country. The prime minister does not care whether there would be economic positives from the dagga; he will not allow it with his Cabinet, therefore Parliament wasted its resources. Parliament should publicise the results of the study so that the nation will be informed and know that Cabinet is robbing them of opportunities.

We have had coroners called to find out the cause of death of certain individuals, especially at the hands of the police. This is a good move because the police service cannot investigate itself and therefore an independent person should do it. I am not sure of the independence of those appointed, but at least they are not from the service that is suspected to have been wrong. The problem is that the appointment of the coroners is always made public and is usually announced by Cabinet. We sometimes even follow in the media what is happening in the proceedings.

An example is the Zavale inquiry where the media kept the nation informed on what was happening and this made me think this exercise was transparent. However, up to this day we still do not know what the findings of the coroner were and someone is not willing to release the findings. There were people implicated in what we got from the media but up to today nothing has been said of those and we have no report.

This is not the only case; we also had inquiries into the deaths of Mathousand Ngubane and Sipho Jele. These reports were going to give closure to the matters and would not have been such an Achilles heel to government.
Recently we have had Parliament working on the influx of certain foreign nationals in the country. This, again was a good move aimed at informing the country on where to improve. One must add that during the days of the exercise we did see something being done and we were told of what was now taking place especially at our airport.

But let us have the report and have those implicated face the music. I was expecting to see the Anti-Corruption Commission working on those who were in the wrong but there is no end result. Similarly with Sibaya where we were supposed to get a report but we still do not, yet we would have loved to see action being taken by government on submissions by the nation. We were all listening and we know what the nation submitted there but nothing is being done. Maybe we would not have had our Parliament backtracking on its submissions if people were listened to at Sibaya. This then led me to ask why is government window dressing; why waste resources on these exercises?