OUTA sight
We hear a lot in ZA about waste and corruption. Maybe because there is so much? But certainly one of the nastiest stenches at the moment is the Gauteng highway improvement scheme, for which road users are all being asked to pay through high tolls.
Those fine chaps at OUTA – recently renamed: Organisation Undoing Tax Abuse – have done some research into what it cost, and what it should have cost.
An international benchmarking exercise of 11 similar projects concluded that we in Gauteng have paid over the odds by 321%. Had there been proper budgeting, the tolls would not be necessary. OUTA is now investigating this and all other projects by the national roads agency SANRAL. We can’t wait.
For a public body to be this reckless with our money – assuming that OUTA has got its sums right – is such a scandal that it makes the President’s use of public money to tart up his family home at Nkandla an object lesson in frugality and restraint.
Of course, if there was extravagance on that scale, we can only hope that those who dipped their hairy paws into the pot of public money are named and shamed. Get outing, OUTA.
Tweet of the Day
Vladimir Putin (spoof) @DarthPutinKGB: We will honour a ceasefire in Syria. Like we did in Ukraine.
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