I just wrote about government’s R300 million malinvestment in Optimal Energy, the company who was supposed to have developed the Joule electric vehicle, that went belly up last year.

The investment was supposed to have yielded a locally produced electric vehicle built with up to 65% locally sourced parts, and created 10,000 sustainable jobs in the process.

Instead, 60 jobs were lost when Optimal Energy shut its doors last year, and R300 million of taxpayer money was wasted.

Mamphele Ramphele is chair of the Technology Innovation Agency that invested R100 million into Optimal Energy. She wasted a whole lot of taxpayer resources right there.

Ramphele has launched a political campaign partly to combat the corruption in the ANC. But what’s worse, malinvestment or corruption?

To me they’re essentially the same thing. In fact the economic implications of allowing very high time preference individuals to be corrupt and steal taxpayer resources are even better than malinvestments, seeing as they’ll spend that money almost instantly and it’ll transfer right back to the most capable possessors of capital in the private sector.