“If You Can’t Count to a Million, You’ll Never See the Billion They’re Wasting”
Let’s break it down in human terms — the numbers that should scare you, the man in the street, because they’re your money being flushed down the drain.
Imagine this: you spend R1,000 every day. That’s a comfortable day of lunches, a fuel tank, a bit of beer after work. At that pace, you’ll spend R365,000 in a year. In three years you’ll hit R1,095,000 — just over one million rand.
Now multiply that by 1,000 and you’ve got a billion rand. One billion.
Yet what do the people responsible for your service delivery do? They blow billions, hand over countless millions in “irregular expenditure,” with not a shred of meaningful accountability.
Here’s the recent proof: according to the South African Police Service (SAPS) audit for 2024/25, they racked up R650–R667 million in irregular expenditure in one year alone. That’s nearly R2 million every single day for 365 days. When you spend R1,000 a day, R650 million is like squandering 650 years of your personal spending.
And it gets worse: these aren’t one-off mistakes. The same agencies are sitting on R2.5 billion+ of unresolved irregular spending, frozen in limbo while your roads collapse, your electricity fails, and your water pump rusts.
So let’s be blunt — you and I, we haven’t counted to a thousand in some cases, never mind a million or a billion. Yet you’re expected to pay tax, levies, rates. Meanwhile, your local municipality, your council, your police service treats your money like a budget for incompetence and self-interest.
They blame “legacy” and “apartheid” and “structural issues”. Fine. But if you’ve been paying taxes for three decades and you still sit in darkness, breathe dust, wait for service trucks, you’ve been waking up to the same broken promise.
Here’s the point:
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If ones and thousands matter, millions matter — and billions are a crime against your future.
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You don’t need a university degree to see your pothole, hear your neighbour’s water cut, watch the new building sit empty next to your township.
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Accepting that the illiterate, the incompetent, the unaccountable “leadership” running your municipality is okay — that acceptance is the root of the disaster.
It’s time for a little math everyone can understand:
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1,000 rand → your everyday budget.
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1 million rand → three years of that budget.
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650 million+ → what SAPS blew in a year.
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2.5 billion+ → the unresolved mess they left behind.
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Your lifetime? Worth more than that. Your children’s future? Priceless. And yet they’re handing it away.
Don’t let them lull you into “that’s how things are”. Demand accountability. Demand basics. Demand your money be treated like your life depends on it — because it does.
Stop counting what you’re told. Start counting what you’re owed. Because they can’t be allowed to throw your billions away while you scrape by.