“Jasper” reflected Maeder Osler, “will talk about anything and everything”. On the stoep one day, the subject of sakgeld came up.

I mean no disrespect to African men here. I really am talking about boys, not men. It is about how we are raised in our cultures.

Pocket Money

Young South African English speakers grew up in the British tradition of ‘pocket money’. Weekly or monthly, our parents gave us a little money, to ’learn money’: saving, spending or both. We saved for the things we wanted. In my childhood, this began at a shilling per week. My 1960 shilling would be buy me a loaf of bread. Today, its purchasing power is R12-15, so it does not buy me a loaf. Sad as that is, it is not my point.

The point is that money meant something radically different to English speaking youngsters compared with what would have been our African friends (if we had them)¹ Our African besties were admitted around puberty into lobola negotiations. This worked out so that their minimum unit of money was a cow, where mine was a shilling. In 1960, this meant they dealt in units of R10-20, where I dealt in units of ten cents (R0.10c). A poetic way to put this is

I am mentally at least a hundred times poorer than my Nguni BFF.

How did this pan out in the 1994 ‘New South Africa’?

Overheard at Killarney Mall

Back in early deomocracy days when I was not too deaf - I was not eavesdropping, the speaker’s voice at the adjacent table in a Killarney Mall (Johannesburg) coffee house, was loud. Just out of university, he was sitting back expansively in an armchair, holding court to a group of admirers.

I was by then in my sixties and was earning his Beemer payment for a job that included software coding. I was astounded. Having spent most of my previous decade playing township jazz, when I left that for a free lance session career, white music personnel were already saying privately “black musicians are expensive”.

That is how it panned out in the 1994 New South Africa. Young African entrants to the job market were seen to be asking ridiculous amounts of money for everything. Bizfolk loved it, because it meant more money for everyone. A little greed goes a long way.

It has not panned out well a generation on, though. “Knowing the price of everything and the value of nothing” has got us nowhere. When your gold standard is a knockoff Louis Vutton handbag, you ought to know you are in trouble. The route to getting rich overnight has nothing to do with value and everything to do with shuffling money around. It is way worse than “knowing the value of nothing”, a free for all where everyone seemed to be getting prices from cellphone numbers.

Catch us if you can

The main route to riches became simple: get tenders and invoice things a thousand times their cost². So, the new pattern is:

• get a tender for a few billion
• quickly inflate invoice amounts
• rush payments (take the money and run)

By the time the auditors arrive, the money is buried in tens of global elctronic transfers. So, what is going on? Put simply, the position taken is:

Hey, we know it is wrong, but we are going to do this until you catch us. So, catch us.

And catching is the one thing we are wondrously slow at. We know that digitising the justice system will stop ’lost’ dockets, so that is the one thing they will not hurry. The last thirty years have seen nearly every large scale tender endeavour inflated like a great rhynophymic proboscis, with the Hitachi contracts even believed to be simple party funding ploys.

One notable recent South African feature is ‘design for failure’ where things are poorly designed up front so as to cause later expensive retrofits, or even damaging things to score repair and maintenance tenders. All of these come about due to lack of both managerial and policing diligence. Accounting is reporting, not wisdom.

One of my favourite routines from any movie was an old movie named “Cheaper by the Dozen”. Father of twelve children (PA) to Accountant (CA):

Cost cutting is treated as wisdom. Big mistake. Accounting has nothing to do with talent or wisdom. If accountants disagree with that notion, let us set their salaries. There is nothing wrong with flipping the script, and it ought to settle a few old scores.

Kaapse Draai

South African rail started with Standard Gauge in both Cape Town and Durban. Then, the accountants had a fit and said

“Uh uh! No no! Cape Gauge”.

Now, two centuries later, the plan is to rebuild all the main routes in Standard Gauge, at a cost that accountants now feel is out of reach. We have little to show for two centuries of massive infrastructure investment.

Now, with no more passenger rail, cars tear themselves to pieces on roads torn to pieces by trucks, crawling toward ports torn apart by idiots, while two century’s worth of railway lies rusting. Duh.

But that is not my point. My point is that we got here courtesy of Lobola Boys. Where we teenagers saved for weeks to afford a vivyl album, and thought R20 was an out-of-reach fortune, our African contemporaries thought R150 (the then price of one cow) was insultingly little in lobola negoations.

Here we sit, paying 80c in every Rand on interest, 16 cents of every Rand wasted or fruitless. That leaves 4c.

Frankly, we live very nice lives still in South Africa, on 4c in the Rand. Nothing wrong with flipping a script: Imagine what this place could be like if we could use all 100 cents in every taxpayer Rand?