Last honest public official to auction integrity to highest bidder

ALICE. The last remaining honest public official in South Africa, Mr Godknows Mkhize of the Alice municipality, says he has had enough of earning an honest living while all the country's other pubic servants enrich themselves without fear of being caught or fired.

Mr Mkhize has confirmed that he will auction his integrity to the highest bidder sometime this week. According to a study conducted by only marginally corrupt analysts, South Africa boasted a total of four honest public officials in 2008.

However two of them were found with passport-manufacturing machinery in their cars earlier this year, while the third, who had threatened to expose graft in his department, accidentally shot himself in the back nine times from a nearby rooftop while cleaning his sniper's rifle.

A delighted Mr Mkhize was quoted at the time as saying that he was proud to be the only honest public servant in the country, and that he would try hard to keep working long hours for a pitiful salary while his colleagues snorted lines of cocaine off the buttocks of models in the cubicle next door. But this morning he admitted that he was "sick and tired" of being honest.

"I want what they have," he told journalists from his desk at the Alice municipality. "The snorting and the buttocks and whatnot." He said that he could not afford cocaine as he had not yet been corrupted, but said he would snort lines of snuff or icing sugar until he "scored some sweet little tender deal".

"Nothing hectic," he explained. "Just something where I get a brown envelope once a week and half a sheep now and then." He said that his long-term goal was to be caught with his hand in the till and suspended on full pay.

"That's the new South African dream," he mused. "It's what every little kid wants nowadays. When I was young I wanted to be an astronaut. Now my boy wants to be a local government councilor suspended on full pay."

Meanwhile the Government has denied that the 16.3 million public servants currently suspended on full pay are harming the economy. Speaking at the launch of a new Government department that will fast-track the sale of state land to old friends, the issuing of tenders to family members and the accidental incineration of police dockets, spokesman Caligula Nyamende said that taxpayers had nothing to fear.

"Those public servants who have been suspended on full pay mostly spend their days texting their friends and chewing bubblegum, which was pretty much all they did while they were working for the state.

"So in that way nothing has changed," he explained. The environmental hazards were “too many” and “too scary” to contemplate, said environmental consultant Somizi Daniels.