Government entities are paying excessive amounts to 'consultants' and top bureaucrats, so much so that in our opinion this amounts to legalised corruption.

The Alternative Information and Development Centre undertook an exercise earlier this year that ended up revealing an inconvenient truth: we compared statistics on Eskom's personnel presented in government expenditure documents with the same information presented by Eskom in its corporate report.

Our conclusion is that government entities are paying excessive amounts to "consultants" and top bureaucrats, so much so that in our opinion this amounts to legalised corruption.

How do we get to that conclusion? The government every year publishes something called the Estimates of National Expenditures.

The Estimates of National Expenditures is a more than 1,000-page publication annexed to the Budget Review. You can strike a horse unconscious with it.

Every year Parliament approves its chapters in 41 votes. They decide budget allocations to over a hundred state agencies and outfits, big and small. It also sets the budget for labour costs of staff employed nationally with projections for the following three years.

For example, this includes the whole police force, all staff at prisons, post offices, the courts, South African Revenue Services, etc. After the February Budget speech, these allocations should be fiercely debated and impertinent...