In 2003 the United Nations General Assembly declared 9 December as International Anti-Corruption Day to “raise awareness about the damaging effects of corruption and promote international efforts to combat it. The day also marks the anniversary of the United Nations Convention against Corruption, the first global legally binding instrument against corruption.”
The theme of this year’s International Anti-Corruption Day is Uniting with Youth Against Corruption: Shaping Tomorrow’s Integrity. The youth comprise 1.9 billion people, or about 25% of the global population.
According to the UN: “Young people have dreams and aspirations, but corruption erodes the fabric of society, stifles progress and deprives them of educational opportunities, job prospects, engagement in public life, success in sports and access to healthcare and other essential services. Additionally, it contributes to environmental degradation and climate destruction.”
Corruption has been exacerbated in a neoliberal world order, and is a challenge to good governance and accountability in the Global North and South, respectively. According to an Ipsos poll, “58% of respondents to a worldwide survey believed that their political system has been captured by an elite that is corrupt, obsolete, and unreformable”.
A common post-colonial experience in Africa, Asia, and Latin America has been an increase in corruption at all levels of government. The inevitable consequence of corruption includes an increase in the cost of public goods and services; declining standards (e.g. collapse of buildings and bridges); excessive billing to the government for redundant goods and services equipment; increasing inequality, poverty and unsustainability.
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The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development has identified the need to “substantially reduce corruption and bribery in all their forms”. This is explicitly captured in Sustainable Development Goal 16.5, which includes “commitments to fight corruption, increase transparency, tackle illicit financial flows and improve access to information”.
The focus on corruption is crucial as it can potentially jeopardise the realisation of all the goals as it hinders “economic growth and increases poverty, depriving the most marginalised groups of equitable access to vital services such as healthcare, education and water and sanitation”.
Billions lost
Corruption permeates the different tiers and departments of the government and the private sector. It is prominent and entrenched in those sectors of government that are tasked with addressing the basic needs of the poor in areas such as housing, education, water and sanitation provision, and healthcare. Billions are lost to corruption every year, with serious consequences for the poorest of the poor.
This poses a massive challenge for poverty alleviation and development, especially in South Africa, where corruption is widening the socioeconomic and spatial inequalities of the apartheid era, with the potential to undermine development and democratic consolidation. Social, economic and welfare indicators reveal high levels of inequality, exclusion and polarisation in South Africa.
State Capture is a type of political corruption in which private interests influence a state’s decision-making to promote their personal interests. In South Africa this has been primarily exposed by the media, and especially whistle-blowers.
State Capture by elites destroys public trust and weakens economic agencies responsible for the implementation of development projects, eroding confidence in the economy. When there is limited trust in public institutions, large companies are reluctant to reinvest profits towards productive use, criminal activities increase, and capital and skills flee the country.
State Capture also merges with patronage politics at a local government level. The ANC’s cadre deployment strategy aided and abetted the State Capture project.
In South Africa, corruption diverts funds from social delivery programmes, which are supposed to promote human rights and social welfare, and into the hands of the power elite. This affects the lives of every citizen, rich or poor.
The majority of the population in South Africa live in poverty, and this directly hurts the poor. Investing in human rights is important to ensure that all people have access to clean water, food, healthcare, education, and housing.
Corruption degrades the fibre of society. High-level politicians and business people are regarded as the main actors in corruption and State Capture, but this has a direct negative impact on ordinary citizens. Also, the governance failures that have resulted in the looting of parastatals such as SAA, Eskom, Denel, SABC and Transnet, have been blamed on State Capture.
Patronage and State Capture are embedded in the country’s sociopolitical and economic systems. The effect of this corruption is that the capital allocated for service delivery is misused. Consequently, the poor have little chance of improving their lives as they are more reliant on state services.
The escalation in corruption in the public sector in South Africa is related, among other factors, to the ambivalence of the ANC government to act decisively against perpetrators, especially as senior party members are implicated.
Supporting whistleblowers
In South Africa civil society organisations like Defend our Democracy, Outa and the Active Citizens Movement played a critical role supporting the fight against corruption and emphasising the need to promote and protect whistleblowers. According to the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organised Crime, there were “1,971 assassination cases in South Africa between 2000 and 2021. Many of those targeted and killed were whistleblowers and human rights defenders who had exposed corruption and stood up for the human rights of their communities, as well as all the people in South Africa.”
Some high-profile cases include Northwest whistleblower and municipal councillor Moss Phakoe, was murdered in front of his house in 2009. In 2023, father and son team Cloete and Thomas Murray were murdered while driving along a national highway in Johannesburg. Cynthia Stimpel was an SAA group treasurer who blew the whistle on an SAA transaction that saved R256m in public funds, but lost her her job and income.
In an anti-corruption march on 8 December 2024, the Active Citizens Movement highlighted the case of Babita Deokaran who was brutally murdered because she refused to rubber-stamp dubious transactions worth R850-million, which would have bought 7,737 electrical beds, 10 MRI scanners and maintained 10 hospitals. While six gunmen involved have been convicted and sentenced to imprisonment, the mastermind/s remain at large.
The Public Service Commission viewed Deokaran’s murder as “part of an orchestrated campaign by forces of darkness in South Africa, who are doing what they can to ensure that the public service is inefficient and ineffective… It is only through dedication and ethical conduct that the tide of lawlessness and corruption will be stemmed in pursuance of a South Africa free from crime and corruption serving the people of the country.”
Former Chief Justice Raymond Zondo emphasised that “whistleblowers helped to stop State Capture. Everybody talks about the protection of whistleblowers, but all of you would be aware the commission went beyond that, recommending we incentivise them to blow the whistle.”
Chief Justice Zondo warned that “if corruption is not arrested, the greatest damage will not be in the funds stolen, the jobs lost or the services not delivered. The greatest damage will be to the belief in democracy itself. It is our shared responsibility, as we celebrate 30 years of democracy, to build a society in which corruption has no place.” DM