BELLA MKHABELA
South Africa’s democracy is a relatively new one. South Africa is highly celebrated for its constitution but the democratisation process has been slow. Over the past five years, the government has been highly criticised for its inability to promote good governance within governmental institutions.
There is a pattern of failure to uphold the principles of democracy such as transparency and accountability, in addition, to struggling to deal with social issues such as poverty, education, crime, and inequality.
At the root of all these problems are the issues is corruption and maladministration, which got far worse during the Covid-19 pandemic.
Corruption has hindered the ability of the government to fulfil its mandate, which is essential to help address the issues that harmed the quality of life in South Africa. This essay will discuss the nature of corruption in the South African government institutions after Apartheid.
The mandate of every government is to provide basic services and essentials that give people a decent quality of life. This translates into specialised departments that provide services that fulfil or protect a basic human right.
Political parties create policies that inform the constituents of a state how they plan on governing the different departments to meet the people’s needs.
In South Africa, citizens vote for political parties in a general election every four years to elect the government body that will decide on policy and service delivery.
Democratic states must meet certain ethical rules and practices that ensure the protection of civilian rights and efficient service provision. Democratic principles ensure the government is kept accountable and that the interest of the people is prioritised at all times by the leaders of a nation.
This ensures that the power held by the government is not misused by a small group of the elite to benefit themselves. The principles of democracy are transparency, participation, accountability and fair rule of law.
Corruption can be described as the use of power and resources of the state for the benefit of a particular group or class. Government has access to resources and influence that impact several people’s lives. This power and influence are supposed to be used to enrich all the lives of the people in a state by providing basic services.
When state power and resources are used to unfairly benefit specific groups, fundamental democratic principles are broken which harms how governments function. Democratic nations have checks and mechanism that should ensure that such behaviour does not affect what government carry out their duties.
However, in a newly formed democratic nation, these checks and balances can be weak in how theories are executed. This makes the chance of corruption so much higher, and more difficult to control and predict. Corruption is extremely harmful because it takes resources away from their intended purpose, unfair advantages to a particular group of people in society and most important breaks fundament principles that make a democratic state. The people who suffer the most are the people who do not have social connections or networks with the people in power.
The people with the least amount of access and social capital are the most likely individuals who are minority or marginalised groups such as the poor, women and children.
In South Africa, the issue of corruption is a huge issue and an ongoing frustration among the constituents of the state. Since President Jacob Zuma's term, public reporting has indicated cases of corruption have become increasingly worse in number and severity.
This has caused the South African government to lose millions in rands to purposes outside the mandate and duties of the government. Leaving a massive amount of people without basic services, such as students in Limpopo province being left without textbooks and reading resources during their schooling year.
To make matters worse is that the South African government still allocates additional funds to try and tackle the issue through investigation boards such as the Zondo Commission. Funds that could have been used to better the general standard of living of the public that is pretty low compared to other nation in the international community.
According to the Corruption Watch, corruption within government institutions has been extremely high in the past five years, especially with mismanagement of funds, theft of funds and employment fraud. Corruption in government institutions has been caused or rather linked to the lack of ethical conduct and consistent accountable measures.
The lack of accountability measures means that even when there is an active attempt to deal with the issues of corruption the process takes too long to resolve. Cases are eventually left without conclusion because there is not enough interest or resources to secure a conviction.
Officials are also protected by the network of people they are connected to, which protects them from a certain process. This is evident by the number of ministers who have had allegations laid against them but were moved to different without a clear conclusion.
Whistle-blowing culture is also difficult to sustain in the South African political climate because it is dangerous. People have been assassinations for speaking out, there is a lack of protection from government investigation units.
This means fewer people are reporting crimes committed in government institutions or speaking about faults in the system. Making the identification of root causes for the culture even hard to investigate and resolve.
The South African government is without a doubt suffering from the issues of corruption has been the biggest hindrance to development as a democratic state and economically.
Addressing corruption is without a doubt one of the top issues that the state needs to address immediately. There are two things the state needs to address to tackle the issues of corruption. Firstly, the integration of ethical standards and codes in the everyday procedure of all government institutions.
Ethical codes and conduct exist for every level of government (local, provincial and national) however are not well implemented. This means while employees are aware of ethical conduct they do not apply them when conducting their duties.
This creates a harmful culture of state officials who serve their own or the interest of specific groups. Secondly, the state departments that are in charge of investigating and monitoring the issue of ethical conduct need to be more consistent in the execution of accountability measures.
The cases of corruption do not reach conclusions when investigations are launched. In other instances, the investigation takes too long to conclude that punishment is not effectively applied against perpetrators in a government institution.
Bella Mkhabela is a Research Assistant at the Institute for Pan African Thought and Conversation
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