I brought up Barack Obama’s bailout briefly the other day to try and illustrate how powerful transparency of expenditure can be for a government.

With a simple website and something long forgotten in politician school, honesty, the President went from being the most untrustworthy first citizen to someone the masses could get on board with. He essentially managed to convince a nation that had recently lost everything to, not only give him more money from their tax coffers than ever before, BUT ALSO without the widespread chaos that I expected. Fast forward to today and for the first time since the bankers destroyed the world in 08 the employment numbers are up, those bailed out are now making more money than before and it seems for now that part of the Presidents problem seems to be solving itself.

So what’s my point here? Do I think our government should be handing out money to try fix the massive social and economic decay facing this nation?

Plainly, F*@K NO I wouldn’t let them hand out food stamps – you saw what happened when they tried to hand out condoms at the ANC centenary (in other news get ready for an influx of baby JUJU’s)!

However, imagine for a moment a country that prided itself on truth, honesty and integrity.  A nation not scarred by previous regimes, a country with leaders not out to spend their time in office filling their pockets, but a democratically elected leadership who told its citizens where exactly its tax money was going.

A small smile creeps up my face as I can feel your skepticism – don’t worry we, like an abused single mother, have been hurt too many times in the past to trust again that easily.

Most people don’t really understand budgets (the country’s credit card debt numbers are evident of that) but here’s a ‘budgets for dummies’ for you.

No matter if the budget is R1000 or R100 billion – the principal is the same. At the start of the fiscal year you start out with a number and you divide it up based on the expenses, you use the previous year as a guide and the coming year as an influence and you make the best decisions you can to split the money in such a way that you will cover all bases. You then hope that your projected income is delivered and then the sums should make sense and you make some money. The theory is really rather simple – the practice however is slightly harder but you get the basic understanding.

Now imagine you as a citizen of a country could log onto the governments website and see exactly how this money was split. What healthcare was allocated VS education VS safety and security VS (most importantly government housing allowances).  I’m not talking about an auditor general’s report that comes out and has so much grey area that it may as well be London in autumn, I mean an easy to use easy to understand website. A place where ALL expenses must be channeled through and explained. Surely if there is an expense it requires some kind of explanation, and surely that explanation is not illegal or unethical then there is no harm in sharing it with the public.

You see under the cloak of governmental darkness, things can be hidden, that’s where people take chances and thats where corruption starts it cancerous life and is fed until it becomes the deadly stage 4 and a country is on life support.

As citizens who are united only by our distrust of this and every other government we need to start asking MORE or our elected officials! We have forgotten who the customer in this relationship is quite simply. You may not realize it but we pay for services that we expect to be done and when they are not, and when our money is being stolen so blatantly surely we have to be stricter on our service providers and in this case it’s the government.

At the end of the day the public, the paying public has the power. You see WE are the ones depositing billions into government funds every month to use ‘to run the country’ and if we don’t, well, at first there will be a standoff (and all the chaos that comes with that) but at some point one party will have to cave. I truly believe with the correct public leader and the right process we can change democracy in a way that will affect future governments around the world.

Imagine that, South Africa leading the fight to a transparent democracy, one where the citizens have the right to see where their money is going. Seems so simple doesn’t it!