Letter to Mahlamba Ndlopfu: Creative accounting for the elites and the poor be damned

Ah, Chief Dwasaho! In the Republic of the Gupta, the powerful enhance their bank accounts and, on occasion, their bums. Today, the accountants, not surgeons, have arrived, my leader, not from the South African Revenue Service (SARS), but from that stubborn place called public memory, where numbers resist convenient interpretation.

You will recall, with discomfort, the season of Phala Phala game farm. Dollars, $580,000, lay hidden in couches. Silence filled the corridors. Explanations travelled further than cattle ever could.

Your defenders were swift: it was not taxpayers’ money. Private. Personal. A matter of business, not the state. The distinction was drawn with such care that one would think ethics itself could be itemised and filed under “non-public”.

A tarnished tale

Now, my leader, allow me to turn your attention to your colleagues in the DA. This party has long introduced itself as the custodian of clean governance, audited virtue and measurable accountability.

Its internal books, however, tell a less-polished story. Seven senior leaders are double-­dipping by receiving salary top-ups. Not rumours whispered in corridors, but figures drawn from the party’s own report.

R326,048 per month. Let us not rush past that number, my leader. It deserves to sit with us for a moment, like an uninvited guest who refuses to leave politely. R326,048 every month. That is R3,912,576 per year. Stretch that over five years, the length of a political term, and we arrive at R19,562,880.

Almost R20-million is circulating inside a political structure that ultimately survives on a system funded by the very taxpayers whose interests it claims to defend.

And at the centre of this carefully managed arrangement sits party leader John Steenhuisen, who already earns R2.6-million per year as a Cabinet minister, yet still receives an additional R39,560 per month from his party as a leader’s stipend.

One must pause there, my leader. Baas John earns at a level comparable to that of the deputy president, whom he loathes, while still presenting himself as the custodian of fiscal discipline.

You will recognise the choreography. At Phala Phala, the argument was that private money exists beyond public scrutiny. Here, the argument is that party money exists beyond constitutional discomfort.

In both cases, the same manoeuvre is performed with admirable discipline. Move the money just far enough away from the public purse, then declare the conscience clean.

Conveniently, no one remembers that all political parties in the Government of National Unity already receive a top-up from the taxpayer: R335,521,000 (three hundred and thirty-five million, five hundred and twenty-one thousand rand), allocated annually, with the DA taking the ­second-largest share after the ANC.

But money, my leader, does not lose its moral weight simply because it changes bank accounts. Which brings us to the detail that seems to trouble no one. The Social Relief of Distress (SRD) grant remains at R370 per month. Unadjusted in the 2026/27 Budget. Approved, my leader, with the support of the very same DA that now manages internal stipends with such imagination.

So, let us count properly. Take the monthly figure of R326,048. Divide it by R370. You arrive at 881 people. Eight hundred and eighty-one South Africans who could receive a month’s SRD grant top-up, from what is paid to seven politicians as a supplement.

Extend that over a year: 10,572 people who could receive a R370 top-up. Stretch it across five years: 52,860 of the wretched of the Earth. Fifty-two thousand eight hundred and sixty lives are held at R370, without relief, while only seven politicians benefit from quiet upward adjustments to their salaries.

And yet, we are told there is no fiscal space. No capacity to adjust the grant. Only discipline for the poor and flexibility for the political class.

Which brings us, inevitably, to the men in blue. The South African Police Service (SAPS) now finds itself entangled in yet another procurement drama. A R360-million health tender, already described as tainted, if not unhealthy.

Twelve officers, my leader. Not peripheral figures in a passing controversy, but colonels, generals and captains facing corruption and money laundering charges.

The benefits, we are told, arrived in curious forms. Ozempic here. Cash channelled through rogue butchers and travel agents. Sergeant Fannie Nkosi’s safe held R385,000 in cash, neatly explained, as always, by a transaction no one can quite locate on paper.

A R70,000 “loan” for the head of (dis)Organised Crime. A Brazilian butt lift for one officer. This, my leader, is salary top-ups for the minor players while the political establishment operates version 2.0 – legal, explained, justified.

The language, once again, is careful. Not verbs of theft. Not nouns of corruption. Only adjectives of “irregularity”. Only softened nouns, “benefits”, “process failures”. We have become a nation of euphemisms.

So, who are the criminals?

And so, we must ask, without the comfort of party colours or political loyalties: who, exactly, are the criminals? Is it the President, the opposition or the police officer, verbs of benefit, nouns renamed, all reduced to “complexity”?

Or is it the system itself, in which verbs of wrongdoing are softened into adjectives, and nouns of crime are rewritten as administrative terms?

Because what unites Phala Phala, the DA top-ups and the SAPS crooked tender is not ideology. It is not race. It is self-granted ­concessions. And once concessions become culture, accountability becomes theatre.

Meanwhile, the SRD grant remains at R370. Unmoved by inflation. Unshaken by hunger. Untouched by the urgency that seems to animate political compensation.

My leader, perhaps I must put the calculator away before it begins to look like an instrument of revolution. Because once one starts counting, one realises that numbers, unlike politicians, do not conjugate to context. It is a story of nouns accumulating, objects shifting and verbs recasting advantage as administration.

R326,048 remains R326,048. R370 remains R370. And hunger, my leader, remains stubbornly indifferent to internal party arrangements, all funded courtesy of the taxpayer, these days hounded by AI at SARS to extract every hidden rand.

Till next week, my man. Keep the books open. DM

This story first appeared in our weekly DM168 newspaper, available countrywide for R35.