3 October 2008
editorial
Johannesburg — THE sordid business of Parliament's travel voucher fraud scandal - popularly known as Travelgate - just simply will not go away.
It is worth remembering that the scandal saw more than R15m being siphoned off by both MPs and a number of travel agents. To its credit, Parliament engaged PricewaterhouseCoopers to investigate the matter. A substantial report, which former speaker and now Deputy President Baleka Mbete has persistently refused to make public, was compiled.
Then the Scorpions, much to the rage of senior African National Congress (ANC) MPs, got involved. This resulted in 29 MPs facing criminal charges and also a number of travel agents. Bathong Travel was put under liquidation.
All but one of the criminal cases, that of ANC MP Mnyamezeli Booi, have been resolved, mostly through plea bargains in which MPs admitted guilt and agreed to pay substantial fines.
There were two classes of MP involved. The original investigation compiled a list of more than 200 MPs whose names had cropped up. Some were criminally liable, and a whole lot more were deemed civilly liable.
There have been persistent dark mutterings that some very senior MPs escaped criminal action while the 29 were the fall guys. Now Mbete has piloted through Parliament's oversight authority a resolution that will absolve those MPs who still owe money in the civil cases of their debt. There are some very senior ones in this category -- Home Affairs Minister Nosiviwe Mapisa-Nqakula (R43708), Land Affairs and Agriculture Minister Lulu Xingwana (R54867), sports committee chairman Butana Khompela (R48720) and Free State Premier Beatrice Marshoff (R64000).
This is the second attempt to do this. Earlier this year, Parliament tried to get other creditors such as South African Airways to join it in instructing liquidators not to pursue the civil claims against MPs, but this was halted by court action. The reasons offered then, and again now, were that the claims were more than three years old and thus prescribed, and that the cost of recovery was more than the money owed.
This all misses the point. The guilty MPs will have to pay their substantial fines, and remain thankful that their sentences were fines and not imprisonment because then they would have lost their jobs.
Ordinary folk owing such large amounts of money would have been hounded by the law through garnishment and administration orders until the debt was cleared.
It is simply outrageous that elected public representatives who owe money to the highest institution in the land should be forgiven their debt. No amount of legalistic argument can hide the fact that they owe Parliament money and should be morally, if not legally, obliged to repay it.
That the mechanism decided on to get the debt absolved is for Parliament to buy the debt back from the liquidators makes the situation worse. It means that Mbete's solution is to take more of the taxpayers' money to buy back the debt. So the taxpayer loses both ways.
Sadly, Mbete's legacy as speaker was not to clean the slate and restore the dignity of Parliament, but to further muddy the already fetid Travelgate waters. The ANC should force its MPs to repay their debts, but of course it won't.
Be the first to Write a Comment!
Copyright © 2008 Business Day. All rights reserved. Distributed by AllAfrica Global Media (allAfrica.com). To contact the copyright holder directly for corrections — or for permission to republish or make other authorized use of this material, click here.
AllAfrica aggregates and indexes content from over 125 African news organizations, plus more than 200 other sources, who are responsible for their own reporting and views. Articles and commentaries that identify allAfrica.com as the publisher are produced or commissioned by AllAfrica.
