BE WARY OF UNINTENDED ABUSE OF STATE ASSETS

Going about my business, and doing my best to mind my business, I can’t help but notice how public servants often find themselves on the wrong side of the Government Vehicle Anti-Abuse Unit.

I think public servants must be thanking their lucky stars that Bhantshana Gwebu’s area of influence does not extend to other areas of government operations, such as manpower.
While abuse of State assets is outlawed by the Constitution, we citizens do not, however, seem to understand the Constitutional provision making every citizen responsible for reporting it. It is actually a crime to witness the abuse of State assets and property and fail to report it.
Unfortunately for public servants, such abuse is sometimes unintended; although it can be said that with most, this is done intentionally. Whatever the reason, abuse of State property is not acceptable.

Reading about the incident involving the convoy of ten cars that went to evict a widow at KaBhudla, one could not help but feel that this was massive overkill. I mean, for the police to have that many cars and officers to evict a woman (a widow for that matter) was a bit too much, if you ask me. I mean, really, is this woman a dangerous criminal or what? Now the taxpayer had to fuel ten vehicles and pay I-don’t-know-how-many-officers to attend to what I would like to believe was a civil matter,   as opposed to a criminal one. That’s way overboard!

Again, you ask yourself if the police will always be available to conduct evictions arising from civil matters such as this for all citizens. I say this because there are so many evictions that need to be undertaken arising from conflicts over fields and so on (imibango).
If they can’t do that, then what reason can they give the nation for doing what they did recently? The Prime Minister is innocent here if you ask me; as he says, he just reported a case to the police. And I do not understand it myself, as I have never known the police to handle civil matters.
One has to ask the reason for this overzealousness in undertaking the visit, noting they were possibly motivated by the fact the PM is their line minister.

Here, the PM is at risk of being perceived to have abused his position, which is apparently not the case. Did the police flout the law here? Was this not abuse of their office as well? Well, I suppose if it was abuse then it was most likely to have been unintended.
Abuse of State property is rampant; vehicles being the main ones, including machinery and plant equipment.
In an area I used to visit, there is a man who uses a government vehicle to do his errands, day in and day out.

To avoid being noticed, he removed the registration plates. My concern is that he does this in full view of the villagers of the area and no one objects or reports this to the Anti-Abuse Unit. Talking of reporting; shouldn’t government have an ‘abuse hotline’ that anyone witnessing abuse of state assets could use to report such cases?

Abuse of State assets, whether intended or unintended, is as insidious as corruption and citizens should be encouraged to report it, otherwise it is not going to be stamped out. I think it costs the taxpayer as much as corruption, if not more.

But to stamp it out, citizens must stand up and be counted by exercising their constitutional responsibility; relying on the Government Vehicle Anti-Abuse Unit alone is not going to end it. It’s all well and good for MPs to throw their weight behind the Unit, but doing their part to report abuse would be even better.

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