Was I the only one who couldn’t really care about last week’s Budget speech?
Don’t get me wrong, I am a patriot through and through and I’m always encouraging people to get involved, or at least show an interest in our country’s affairs.
And I knew that this one was going to be interesting, because the new Finance Minister had to make an impression with just about everybody - investors, big business, colleagues and public service staff; but I would say, mostly, the voters.
I understood all of this when I chose not to watch last week’s Budget speech.
It’s proving a little hard to be interested in our financial affairs, considering all the revelations of corruption and theft.
It’s like working on your house budget, the morning after you’ve been burgled.
You just feel so violated that you can’t bring yourself to sit down and plan your future.
It all seems so futile, because Minister Tito Mboweni’s intentions might be great, but somewhere someone is going to plot and plan to steal that money.
And they’re probably going to get away with it, because we seem to be in an era of no accountability and definitely no consequence.
And this feeling seems to have been borne out with even more weekend revelations of theft at Eskom.
It appears there was a feeding frenzy at the power utility, that cost us taxpayers R170 billion and possibly as much as R500bn over a 15-year period.
Most of it is related to the building and maintenance of Eskom’s Medupi, Kusile and Ingula power plants over the years.
And this is not even to mention the millions that were paid to the Guptas for coal that was never delivered. And we wonder why the lights keep going out.
So you see, between Nkandla, Zuptagate, Bosasa, the SABC’s golden handshakes, Eskom and everything we must still learn, and things we’ll never learn, it’s difficult for me to feel patriotic about our budget.