For some reason, commercial crime – be it fraud or corruption – always gets better press than murder or violent crime. Maybe it’s because we never see the pathologists at the scene of the crime zipping victims into body bags.
The argument that white collar crime is victimless leads to the inevitable conclusion that those convicted of it should not be treated as harshly as rapists and murderers.
It’s a false premise, but one that steadily gains traction because we have allowed white collar crime to become abstract. Maybe it is a coping mechanism because we are drowning in a tsunami of news, from State Capture in all its iterations to Steinhoff.
We dare not normalise this, as tempting as it is to stick our heads in the sand. Instead, we have to push against the abstraction of white-collar crime to make it, and its consequences, as real in our minds as the gore and horror of violent crime.
When people steal from a company it affects the livelihoods of those who depend on it for their jobs – or to provide services to. When investors cannot be sure that their money will be safe because the accountants are party to the deception, then entire institutions like stock exchanges start to fail.
In particularly extreme cases, pension funds holding the futures of those who literally invested their working lives into them can collapse. In this case, the victims are especially vulnerable, because they have run out of time to bounce back.
The consequences of corruption are even more dire.
A contract is normally issued for the provision of a public need: a road, a hospital or a school. It is assumed to be a document that has been drawn up by people properly qualified to do that and to cost it, be they consulting engineers, architects or quantity surveyors working for the procurement department.
Let’s say the project is costed at R500-million. The contract is then put out for companies to tender for. But let’s stop there. Where does the money come from? It comes from taxes levied on the people of that country; directly and indirectly: VAT, income tax, personal tax, corporate tax.
It seems trite to have to explain all this, but that’s precisely what we must do if we are to reverse our intellectualisation of this scourge that has rendered it abstract.
In cases of corruption the person winning the contract pays a bribe. If it’s 10%, that’s R50-million of the R500-million. It won’t be the last inducement, at least another R50-million will have to be paid out further down the line, leaving R400-million to do the eventual job – if we are lucky.
Contract awarded to the most connected person
We tend to assume that the contract will be awarded to the most able person, but if there is corruption involved that doesn’t happen. Instead it gets awarded to the most connected person. That person is invariably neither talented nor experienced, so they are unable to deliver on what they have just won – unless they are paid more to buy in those skills.
A corrupt contract therefore leads to two possible outcomes: the first is we get something that is built to the lowest standard, is unfit for purpose and doesn’t last. If it’s a building it might collapse and kill the people inside, if it’s a road, it might wash away in the first downpour of the season.
The second scenario is that the project becomes over-specced, overdue and way over budget – money from the public.
Either result leads to the same outcome: the people who were waiting for that school to use education to break their children out of multi-generational poverty; or a hospital to be treated for an otherwise curable ailment; or a road to get to either the school or the hospital — are deprived of what they actually paid for.
Whether they end up being trapped in poverty, their kids deprived of education or dying from what should not have killed them, they are trapped in a vicious cycle of hopelessness that feeds upon itself because the only people who seem to be doing well are the tenderpreneurs themselves in their flashy imported SUVs with enough road clearance to bundu-bash through the potholes that their stolen money should have fixed, from one rural or urban contract ribbon-cutting ceremony to the next.
Those tenderpreneurs, trading their connections for contracts, have sucked the value not out of the government or out of the rich, as some of the latter-day Robin Hood narratives might have it, they’ve taken it from the people who could least afford it. It was their taxes.
Robin Hood has been robbing the ’hood – but we don’t tell that story enough. And, when these vultures are eventually caught out, society suffers all over again as they pay for the best lawyers to keep justice at bay, exhausting every legal option in a justice system that is already overstretched and often overwhelmed, and which now must contest pointless appeals in every possible court of law.
At the same time, the corrupt wage a brutal war in the court of public opinion, suborning the media and muddying the truth by buying airtime and column inches to get their mendacious side of the story across on as many platforms as possible.
Or killing whistleblowers, as we know only too well.
Dante’s inferno
Corruption is like living through all nine circles of Dante’s inferno simultaneously: limbo, lust, gluttony, greed, wrath, heresy, violence, fraud and – when the stakes get higher – even treachery, bringing down the government if necessary to avoid going to jail.
But if we turn that story on its head and the school gets built in the first place, the children who get to go there become trained. A decent company led by skilled people whose hard-won education is put to good use gets the opportunity to build another project in their area and employs them.
Some of them in turn become service providers and create their own jobs for people in the community. As they get bigger and employ more people, they become the role models of what can be achieved if these projects work the way they ought to.
More kids see the value of staying in school, getting educated and ploughing back into the community in which they grew up.
Stealing hope
Opportunities beget opportunities and the vicious cycle becomes a virtuous cycle in which everyone benefits, not just one person in a flash car benefiting their small circle of family and cronies and stealing opportunity, quality of life and hope from communities.
That’s why corruption is so bad. That’s why corporate fraud is so bad. It breaks our faith in institutions, it demoralises us, and it normalises wrongdoing because it creates the illusion that the only way anyone with ambition can get ahead is by cutting corners and breaking laws because there are no consequences.
And people do die — some directly but most indirectly — because of corporate fraud or corruption, and our ideals, and ultimately our souls die too. With opportunity and hope stolen, trapped in poverty, desperation feeds crime and gangsterism. That’s why these crimes carry the same minimum sentence as rape and murder – and that’s why we must always encourage the arrest, prosecution and punishment of these criminals with the same vim and vigour as we do for the sexual predators and killers.
Let’s see clearly the concrete consequences of corruption and give our sympathies, our active support, to the thousands, millions whose lives are so much worse off as a result.
Let’s work towards creating opportunities for them, the hard working self-improvers, not for the blustering and self-pitying corporate thieves when they are eventually called out and sent to jail.
What will come from that is a more hopeful, more vibrant South Africa. As Madiba said: “It always seems impossible until it’s done.” DM