Vouchers and vultures

If you want to turn a good idea and a fairly decent initiative into a major fiasco, here's how: put together a benefit for the poor. Then make it available to only some of said poor, needy and desperate.

- Richard J Mann

Make the organisation and the criteria so loose and vague that there's lots of room for fraud, theft, nepotism and favouritism. Make sure that the communication is so vague as to be almost non-existent, so that jolly rumours can abound and have people scrambling around like chickens at feeding time.

Strip these people of the last vestiges of dignity that they may have.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the great South African voucher fiasco.

I first heard about the voucher initiative about a year ago. During a break at a function, someone whispered to me that the local councillor was giving out vouchers to the needy. This was a "don't tell anyone" sort of whisper, accompanied by furtive glances left and right.

I later forgot all about it but that was certainly an early sign that something is rotten in the state of Denmark. When such things are whispered in corridors, one needs to ask.