It would be laughable if it wasn’t such a serious indictment of the quality of leadership in our country.
On Tuesday evening we watched sport and culture minister Nathi Mthethwa fumble incoherently to defend his department’s plan to erect a giant national flag with a R22m price tag.
The flag is to be put up in Freedom Park, supposedly as a tourism attraction and “an expression of national pride and patriotism”.
According to Mthethwa, the flag would be designed to light up, standing tall as a symbol of our proud nationhood, day and night – Eskom permitting, we suspect.
He told eNCA the construction of the flag would be a boost to the steel industry. But here’s the kicker: “It is an answer to government’s persistent aspiration for a united and socially cohesive SA society,” the department’s feasibility study report says.
This alone is an astonishing claim, even by Mthethwa’s generally poor standards of developmental conceptualisation.
Justifying the costs, the department says the money would be spent on a geotechnical investigation, foundation concrete, steel, logistics, crane hire, site establishment, operations and consulting fees.
History tells us that it is through exorbitant project costs and consultants fees that government money is often siphoned by unscrupulous officials and businesspeople.
Therefore, the public scepticism that this may be another looting scheme is completely justified. Yet, Mthethwa is seemingly oblivious to why there is, rightfully, public outrage over this.
This is perhaps not surprising from a man who not too long ago defended claims that former president Jacob Zuma’s Nkandla pool built unduly by the taxpayer was in fact a firepool.
This demonstrates yet again that Mthethwa has no grasp of the responsibility he has in the crucial portfolio he occupies. Nor does he comprehend the principle of accountability and the prudent management of public resources.
We believe Mthethwa’s latest gimmick must be rejected as an unnecessary, even crass, wastage of much-needed public money. It must be stopped in its tracks.
In a country where artists are battling to survive, where monuments of our national history and art assets are falling apart, we can ill-afford to spend millions of rand on an ill-conceived vanity project which adds no significant value to our developmental goals.
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