KingMhare

It is very damning that many houses that have been demolished were built on stands which residents believed, with good reason, to have been acquired legally. To demolish those homes afterwards, while Council retreats behind the defence that the paperwork was false, is to convert a failure of the state into a punishment of the citizen. It treats the resident as the author of the fraud, when the resident was in truth its most exposed victim. Who falsified the paperwork? A fraudulent council allocation does not falsify itself. It requires access to council files, stamps, layouts and personnel. It requires an insider who knows which stand numbers are plausible, which signatures will pass scrutiny, and which offices will look the other way. If Council concedes that false documents circulated, it has already conceded that its own system was compromised. It cannot then present itself as an innocent bystander. It is, at minimum, guilty of gross negligence in the stewardship of public land, and at worst, complicit in a scheme that profited from the desperation of home seekers. If officials were involved, those officials should be identified, suspended, investigated and prosecuted. Yet in scandal after scandal, the machinery of accountability moves swiftly against the resident and slowly, if at all, against the official. The St Martins land scandal is the clearest illustration of this asymmetry. It has become a byword for opaque allocations. Why is it no Council officials have been arrested in connection with a Pay Scheme which was known officially with infrastructure material kept at Cleveland? A scandal of that magnitude cannot be explained away as a clerical error or just ignored. It implies a chain of decisions, approvals and omissions. If no one in that chain is held legally responsible, the public is entitled to conclude that accountability is being performed rather than practised. Mayor Jacob Mafume cannot sustain a public posture of fighting Council corruption while the institutions under his leadership produce no consequences. Leadership, in this context, has a concrete test: names published, dockets opened, officials charged, assets investigated and the public told, in plain terms, what happened and who authorised it. Ultimately, the principle is simple and morally unavoidable: residents cannot be made to suffer for corruption within the system that was meant to protect them.