The Guptas may be gone, but corruption still has South Africa by the throat. We may have made progress in ridding Eskom and Transnet of a set of organised criminals, but we have made no progress in numerous other institutions.
Thanks to the Madlanga commission, we now know far more about the corruption in Tembisa Hospital and in the South African Police Service. And thanks to the arrest of the director-general and CFO of the national department of health, we now have a picture of how corruption seems to be taking place in that organisation.
The details are deeply disturbing because they point to a web of criminals at the heart of the state. In particular, they indicate the involvement of our first two lines of defence in the fight against corruption – CFOs and the police.
We now know that Babita Deokaran reported suspicious activity directly to the CFO of the Gauteng health department shortly before she was assassinated and that the CFO later exited the organisation with a golden handshake. In other news, it now appears that a senior official in the national health department reported suspicious activity to the CFO and director-general of that department and was disciplined for his efforts.
The Madlanga commission has revealed how easy it is to involve senior police officials in criminal networks and loot the police service itself. Where do we turn when the criminals are embedded in financial management, the police service and the leadership?
There are other state institutions where it is becoming evident that large-scale corruption is taking place but where we don’t know the details. One of these is the City of Johannesburg. There are persistent reports of criminal networks operating in the city. Johannesburg is in deep financial trouble and there is little doubt that this is caused in part by rampant corruption. When the details emerge they may be as shocking as what we have learnt from the Zondo and Madlanga inquiries.
We urgently need a new national approach to organised crime in the state. We have many laws and a number of institutions, but they are not touching sides. This is partly because they assume corruption is isolated and that key leaders are not involved. They rely on honest people reporting to their seniors, who will then take action. When those assumptions do not hold these laws have little to offer us.
Two urgent changes need to be made. First, we need a new approach to state procurement that makes greater use of digitisation. Manual procurement is key to corruption because it relies on the judgments of state officials to decide which bids are most qualified. Officials routinely award work to cronies, including start-up companies that have no track record at all. We need a serious rethink of our procurement legislation.
Second, we have to stop creating large pools of money that we place in the hands of government officials. The sector education & training authorities (Setas) are an example of pooled funds that can easily be misused. National Health Insurance (NHI) is another. While NHI may be designed with the intention of creating a pool of money that can be used to share health resources equitably, experience suggests that it will be targeted by criminals and their protectors in the state, including health administrators.
The Madlanga commission and other courageous initiatives have shown how pervasive corruption is. It is time to take this seriously as a public policy issue by cutting off opportunities for large-scale theft and revamping the systems that make it possible.
• Bethlehem is an economic development specialist and partner at Genesis Analytics. She has worked in the forestry, renewable energy, housing and property sectors as well as in local and national government. She writes in her personal capacity.