From plough to harvest peril — when corruption turns the ox into the assassin

Ungayilambisi inkabi elimayo. Do not starve the ox that ploughs the field.

Nobody in particular taught me this. Everybody said it.

In the village that raised me, the principle was as plain as morning: you feed the ox, you protect it, you invest in it – not because it matters more than the other animals, but because the harvest depends on its strength. The word itself was the teacher. Hold on to that word – inkabi. Before this piece is done, it will return wearing different clothes.

I wonder whether South Africa still remembers it.

Gauteng occupies barely 1.5% of the country’s land, yet it is SA’s largest provincial economy, producing roughly a third of our national output. It is home to Johannesburg, the financial heart of the continent, the busiest freight corridors in the nation and the densest concentration of economic activity anywhere between Cairo and the Cape. It is not simply another province. It is the ox that pulls SA’s harvest.

The tax figures appear even more dramatic – Gauteng is often credited with generating close to half of all revenue collected by the SA Revenue Service. As a chartered accountant, I must audit my own number: that share is inflated by head offices registered in Johannesburg while the underlying work happens elsewhere.

But even discounted honestly, the conclusion holds. The wealth that funds schools in Limpopo, hospitals in the Eastern Cape and social grants in every province is disproportionately generated in one small, crowded province. That is not something to resent. A nation should share its prosperity.

But before I ask what the country owes Gauteng, honesty requires me to ask what Gauteng owes the country.

Recruited, taxed and dispossessed

I grew up in a labour-sending village. I know which direction the wealth first flowed. For a century, the Witwatersrand fed itself on the men of kwaNkabini and a thousand villages like it – men recruited, taxed and dispossessed into the mines, sending wages home and, too often, bodies after them.

The villages carried the true costs of that economy. They raised the next shift of workers, nursed the injured, buried the dead – all off the mines’ balance sheet, so that the gold could be cheap. Gauteng did not become the engine on its own. It was built, hand over hand, by the very provinces it now subsidises.

So when money flows today from Johannesburg to Limpopo, it is not charity. It is a ledger being balanced.

And precisely because the villages paid for this ox, they are entitled to a working one. Which brings me to the audit – and the audit tells a story very different from the one Gauteng’s leaders like to tell.

The comfortable story is that Gauteng is starved: that National Treasury’s needs-based formula sends the money to poorer provinces while the engine room’s roads crumble and its pipes burst. The Auditor-General’s consolidated local government report, released in June, dismantles that story. Metros control more than half of local government’s R622-billion expenditure envelope.

Gauteng’s three metros – Johannesburg, Tshwane and Ekurhuleni – have all regressed this term, with the Auditor-General condemning deteriorating financial health, collapsing service delivery, degrading infrastructure and “very poor” consequence management, and singling out Johannesburg, which slid to a qualified audit opinion.

Follow the money

Follow the money further. Since 2021/22, metros and their entities have incurred R73.8-billion in irregular expenditure – almost all of it stemming from procurement failures: tenders and contracts awarded outside the rules.

Johannesburg Water’s non-revenue water has risen from 29% in 2007 to nearly 45% today: almost half the water the City buys is never billed, lost to leaks, theft and broken meters. And the capacity to spend? Three months into the the 2025/26 financial year, Johannesburg had spent 8% of its R8.7-billion capital budget. By December, 26% – against a halfway norm of roughly 50% – with the City’s own reports blaming procurement bottlenecks and payment delays, not a shortage of funds.

I spent years at the Auditor-General’s office. I know what these numbers mean. The ox is not starved. The feed is spilled before it reaches the mouth.

This is still every South African’s problem, because South Africa has one economy. When a bridge fails in Gauteng, freight slows, businesses incur costs, investors hesitate, jobs disappear, tax revenues shrink – and the capacity to fund redistribution shrinks with them.

The prosperity of Limpopo depends partly on the prosperity of Gauteng. So does the Eastern Cape’s. So does KwaZulu-Natal’s: much of what passes through the Port of Durban is headed to Gauteng or leaves from it. None of this is because Gauteng is more deserving. It is because the harvest is common property. Every rand lost to a leaking pipe in Johannesburg is a rand that never reaches a clinic in Limpopo. Mismanagement in Braamfontein steals from the village twice.

Now let me return to the word, as I promised.

Ask a young South African today what inkabi means, and they will not say ox. They will say hitman. In one generation, the word for the animal that pulls the village’s harvest has migrated to the man hired to kill for a paymaster. Whether or not that is how the slang first emerged, the metaphor is revealing. The ox serves whoever holds the yoke. So does the hired gun.

Spilled feed

The word followed the money. The Moerane Commission found that the assassinations plaguing KwaZulu-Natal’s politics are overwhelmingly contests over council seats and tenders – over access, in other words, to the trough. The spilled feed is what pays the izinkabi. The corruption of the word and the corruption of the money are the same event. When a local economy shifts from production to extraction, the ox is retired and the inkabi is hired.

I have written before about the tap my brother built. Bongumusa laid a road, a bridge and a communal tap for our village before there was such a thing as a paid councillor. He fed the village and asked for nothing. When he later stood to serve as a councillor, a man waited for him in the wattle trees above the village and fired four bullets at him on his morning run. Each one passed through the tracksuit top that providence had wrapped around his neck that morning. He keeps that top to this day. The man who fired the shots was never convicted.

That is what this country does to people who do the ox’s work. It sends the inkabi for them.

And here is the thread that ties my brother’s tracksuit to the Auditor-General’s report: impunity. The gunman in the wattle trees faced no consequence. Neither, overwhelmingly, have the people behind the R73.8-billion lost to irregular expenditure. The Auditor-General reports that disciplinary boards do not conclude their cases, that transgressions go unpunished, that the same findings recur year after year. It is one impunity, wearing two uniforms.

So the prescription is not, first, more money. It is governance, enforced. Consequence management that actually concludes – officials dismissed, losses recovered, dockets that reach court. Infrastructure funds ring-fenced and conditional, so that money meant for pipes cannot be absorbed into the general trough. Proven capacity to execute capital budgets before those budgets are enlarged. The Auditor-General has called for systemic intervention in the metros. These are not technocratic luxuries. They are how a farmer checks the trough.

Faulty funding formula

And once the trough holds feed, then yes – strategic national assets deserve strategic national investment. A funding formula that weighs need but never asks where growth comes from will eventually have less and less to redistribute. Redistribution without growth eventually becomes redistribution of decline. Growth without redistribution eventually becomes prosperity for the few. A successful nation requires both – but neither survives a leaking trough.

The farmers I knew in kwaNkabini did not only carry feed to the kraal. They checked the trough for cracks. They watched who handled the feed along the way. Because feeding the ox was never about favouring the ox. It was about protecting the harvest – and the harvest belongs to the whole village.

I will know my country is healing when the word comes home. When inkabi means, once again, the animal that pulls the plough.

And not the man who waits in the wattle trees. DM