READER LETTER | Tackle corruption to save what’s left

As the country prepares for the most crucial general elections in our lifetime, let us seriously take stock of the past 30 years of ill-governance.

Politics and governance in our rainbow nation have lost their sacredness as vultures ruthlessly embezzled funds allocated to assist the citizenry suffering under abject poverty. SA has witnessed endemic corruption that has cost our poverty-stricken nation billions of rands.

It has mired and enmeshed our hard-won democracy in a solid vice grip that will take years to untangle. Greed has enveloped the land on a monumental scale that defies logic and description. We must as a matter of urgency, ruthlessly tackle this contagious scourge before it decimates what's left of our country.

The wealth of the both the corruptor and  corruptee are already obscenely vast. Most of this obscene loot has already left the state coffers and  found its way into safe havens across our crime-infested country. These predators are in fact perpetual motion machines designed to endlessly extract wealth and leave the masses destitute. These money-gobbling pirates cloak themselves in garments of respectability, and insatiable as they are ruthless in their quest to annex a nation's wealth.

Exposing them would mean revealing the origins of the sources of their ill-gotten fortune and the grotesque scale on which they contrive to amass them with active collaboration from those in the corridors of power. Why have we remained silent and inactive for more than two decades when a major threat is now an ominous financial catastrophe?

The obscenely stolen money was more than enough to feed every child well, to heal every sick person, to house the homeless masses and to educate every struggling child without saddling them with hideous debt. Shameless greed in obtaining unlawful wealth as a success symbol at the expense of the lawful and starving masses will result ultimately in an uprising that will devour the entrails of the nation on an epic scale. Everyone, everywhere will lose everything.

Farouk Araie, Benoni