Image: Bram Lammers Photography, State Capture Commission Workshop, Johannesburg
By Lawson Naidoo and Sarah Meny-Gibert
[First published in the Sunday Times: The focus shift we need to fight corruption]
Corruption, Paul Pretorius emphasised at a recent workshop on the State Capture Commission, is evolving as we speak. We must get to grips with the systemic nature of corruption – building the systems and institutions to combat it is a matter of urgency.
‘Let’s stop being so polite.’ This was the refrain from the usually inscrutably diplomatic and measured Paul Pretorius SC during his keynote address to the State Capture Commission Workshop hosted by the Council for the Advancement of the South African Constitution and the Public Affairs Research Institute last week. Pretorius, evidence leader at the Zondo Commission of Inquiry and now a consultant with the NPA’s Investigating Directorate Against Corruption (IDAC), was exasperated at the slow implementation of Zondo’s recommendations and other interventions necessary to combat corruption in its new guises.
‘Too little, too slow’, he lamented. Corruption, Pretorius emphasised, is evolving as we speak, with often violent criminal syndicates proliferating in many parts of government and across sectors. Not to mention the new frontiers of organised crime – illegal mining, extraction syndicates, assassinations and extortion/kidnapping, and sustained sabotage of public infrastructures. Currently, law enforcement lags behind these operations: we need to urgently capacitate our law enforcement agencies to get a step ahead.
As the Public Protector Kholeka Gcaleka noted in her address to the workshop, we need to reform the systems that enable corruption, from questions of how to build a professional public service, to how we resource our oversight and anti-corruption institutions.
The National Prosecuting Authority (NPA’s) lack of administrative independence is hampering its effective functioning. The NPA needs its own accounting officer and to secure its budget directly via a vote from Parliament, not through the Department of Justice. The National Director of Public Prosecutions (NDPP) should have greater involvement in appointments of senior NPA officials. We should respond to these basic institutional requirements as a matter of urgency. Indeed CASAC proposed that these amendments should have been incorporated when the NPA Amendment Bill was being considered by Parliament last year. Such changes should also include the process by which the NDPP is appointed, to formalise the advisory panel that President Ramaphosa utilised in 2018.
Even if the full gamut of Zondo recommendations were implemented, this would not be enough to combat the evolving nature of corruption. ‘We cannot prosecute our way out of corruption,’ contended the NDPP Shamila Batohi in her address to a Freedom Under Law lecture last week. Pretorius emphasised that there are no easy corruption cases to prosecute – in addition to the higher evidentiary burden of ‘beyond a reasonable doubt’, these are complex cases where the accused will ‘lawyer-up’ to drag cases out. Prosecution remains the rifle in the armoury to tackle corruption and state capture, but that cannot be our only weapon.
In August 2022, President Cyril Ramaphosa appointed a National Anti-Corruption Advisory Council (NACAC) to advise on implementing the National Anti-Corruption Strategy and establishing a strengthened anti-corruption system. NACAC’s mid-term report to the President was submitted in March 2024, in which proposals for South Africa’s future anti-corruption architecture were mooted. Nine months later, there has been no formal response from the President. While the report has not been publicly released, the NACAC Chair Firoz Cachalia, speaking at the State Capture Commission Workshop, proffered a glimpse into its contents: an Office on Public Integrity (OPI) is proposed as an independent anti-corruption institution – a Chapter Nine body – to address systemic corruption through a combination of prevention and enforcement capacities. This focus on the systemic nature of corruption is welcomed and should be actioned. This OPI would integrate the existing Special Investigating Unit into its operations, and work in close collaboration with the Hawks and the IDAC.
The corruption we’ve seen grip our state-owned enterprises is not simply the result of a cynical greedy elite. It is enabled by the design and capacities of our state administration, by sophisticated criminal networks, and by the nature of our wider political economy. We require a response that understands the complex and systemic nature of corruption.
‘When a government is afflicted by corruption, we tend to put the blame on people for 80% and on structure for 20%. But we’ve probably got the proportions reversed,’ says Christopher Stone from Oxford’s Blavatnik School of Government, who has studied South Africa’s corruption for many years.
To address this, civil society must continue to mobilise for state accountability and the state-building project. For example, to advance the procurement system into one that works for officials, that drives the economy’s transformation and that is substantially open to public scrutiny. Justice Raymond Zondo, in his report to the Presidency, dedicated substantial territory to questions of procurement reform. Enhanced transparency provisions have recently been included in South Africa’s new legislation for public procurement – the Public Procurement Act. As Zukiswa Kota, from the Public Service Accountability Monitor (PSAM) noted at the workshop, civil society must use these new provisions to push for enhanced transparency infrastructures – including integrated digital systems, and better public procurement data.
While digital technology is no silver bullet, there are some encouraging projects underway to evolve the state’s integrity management systems. The Presidency has developed a centralised register of people who have been dismissed from organs of state or who have resigned to avoid being disciplined – allowing employers to check whether an ID number corresponds with one linked to a dismissal or dubious resignation. There is much room to expand these kinds of initiatives, though it will mean head-on action to make the state’s information technology agency, SITA, fit-for-purpose.
To take up Pretorius’s plea, civil society will sharpen its focus to demand urgent institutional strengthening to counter corruption, towards a state that serves the public good, and strengthens our democratic foundations.
‘What Now Since the State Capture Commission: Deliberation and feedback on the priority issues from the Zondo Commission that civil society needs to watch’ was a workshop held jointly by the Public Affairs Research Institute (PARI) and the Council for the Advancement of the South African Constitution (CASAC) on 15 November in Johannesburg.
