Johannesburg — IT IS impressive amnesia that allows Finance Minister Trevor Manuel and the Financial Services Board (FSB) to be shocked by Vuyani Ngalwana's decision to quit as pensions fund adjudicator over frustration at the lack of support he's received from government.

A mushroom cloud of deja vu pulses over this saga. Ngalwana is, after all, treading the same path as his predecessor, John Murphy, who also pleaded -- to no avail -- for help to allow him to do his job properly.

Murphy, now a high court judge, opened the first adjudicator's office in 1998. "At the time, I borrowed a cellphone and walked the streets of Cape Town looking for an office," he says.

Ngalwana built on his foundation and became a celebrity as he tackled the life assurers head-on, providing the most potent obstacle yet to the companies that had extorted consumers for decades.

Consumers reacted, and complaints grew 105% last year. But when Ngalwana requested extra budgetary firepower to hire lawyers to handle complaints, the FSB vetoed his request.

Last month, Ngalwana said he had been "stymied at every turn by persons who seem concerned more with procedural niceties than considerations of pragmatism" and that "resources are less than adequate... to meet our statutory mandate".

Last week, Murphy said he faced exactly the same obstacles as Ngalwana, before he quit six months before his contract ended in 2004.

One problem, he says, is that the FSB, which holds the purse strings, has a "natural tension" with the adjudicator.

"Often the reason you have a problem is because of a failure of regulation. If the adjudicator pronounces on something that has come about as a failure of the regulatory system, this reflects adversely on the FSB," he says.

He says it doesn't surprise him that Ngalwana's relationship with the FSB has become strained. "My relationship with them was also fractious," he says.

Ngalwana has given two major reasons for leaving.

The first is that the FSB won't increase his budget to allow him to deal with a crushing backlog of more than 3000 complaints.

The second is due to frustration caused by the legal rule that allows life companies simply to take his rulings to court and get them overturned "by default".

Now, while Murphy's complaints at the time didn't relate to his budget, he most certainly raised hell about a framework that he says is "totally unworkable" for the adjudicator.

"I made certain suggestions in my time as adjudicator about coming up with a different model and I was politely but repeatedly ignored, and not given what I needed to carry on," he says.

When it comes to court appeals, consumers don't have the cash to fund a battle, and the adjudicator is forbidden from defending his ruling in court.

So what happens -- as we saw in the recent Old Mutual case -- is that life companies typically get rulings in their favour by default.

As evidence, Murphy cites the fact that every time he was allowed to defend one of his adjudicator rulings in court, the ruling was upheld; every time he was forbidden from defending that ruling, it was overturned.

"We need to rethink the model, and we need a new model where either the adjudicator can defend his rulings in court, or the powers of a court to review rulings are limited," he says.

When it comes to the cash, Manuel says this year saw a "111% increase" in the levy on pension funds (now R2,50 a year, from R1,18 last year), and a 17,3% increase in Ngalwana's R15,9m budget. But how could that 17,3% hope to address the 105% increase in complaints last year?

If brown-shoed bureaucrats cannot see the need for more funds in a year when life assurers have finally been forced to atone for their greed, should they be holding the purse strings?

Ngalwana has done more than most to help consumers. Why is government willing to squander this political capital?

Poignantly, Murphy says Ngalwana's departure "leads you to question the commitment of those in the regulatory framework to seeing justice done".

The sobering part is that un-less the FSB appoints a simpering bureaucrat to replace Ngalwana, those in power will again feign shock when this scenario repeats itself in a few years.