A woman was scammed while trying to bribe her way to the front of a Home Affairs queue
By Ashley Green-Thompson
THIS week I was involved in fascinating discussions about how ordinary citizens and organisations in civil society can contribute to holding our government accountable. It’s a complex discussion that must consider all aspects of government’s responsibilities, from service delivery to dealing with crime, from managing the economy and representing South Africans in world affairs. And more.
An ever-present issue in these discussions is corruption, and it has the potential to dominate the conversation. I shared with you in a previous column my amusement at a woman who was scammed while trying to bribe her way to the front of a Home Affairs queue. There is a personal responsibility we all carry to not behave in corrupt ways, or else we’ll never be rid of the scourge.
Corruption in our government is a well-documented phenomenon and a serious problem that directly affects the country’s ability to meet the needs of the people it is meant to serve. My ideology is fast becoming very simple – Stop Stealing.
But we must be wary of thinking that rooting out the corrupt and venal who occupy office in our civil service and body politic will be the silver bullet for all our problems. We all know a corrupt politician or official. We very seldom reflect on the corruption that thrives in the private sector.
The Steinhoff heist is South Africa’s largest corporate fraud, but it seems to be quickly fading in our collective memories. Investors lost over 250 billion rands (US$13.97 billion) of their hard-earned savings to Steinhof’s various investment vehicles, including unit trusts, endowments, retirement annuities, and pension and provident funds. The Public Investment Corporation (PIC) that manages
public sector workers’ retirement funds lost up to 21 billion rands ($1.17 billion) when Steinhoff’s management misappropriated workers’ pension funds.
This week we repatriated the remains of South African soldiers killed in eastern DRC, and as a nation mourned their deaths. This continued conflict is fuelled in large part by competition for the immense mineral resources to be found there. It is fertile ground as well for the deadly corruption involved in securing mining concessions, the opaque arms dealing to militarily secure access to those minerals, and the theft of billions of what should be public money that appropriate tax would bring.
And the systems that are set up by these businessmen to steal is mind-boggling. The Tax Justice Network says that recent cross border tax abuse by multinational companies and individuals who hid their undeclared assets offshore amount to US$347.6 billion and US$144.8 billion respectively.
That’s nearly half a trillion dollars! Can you imagine such a sum of money? Countries around the world are losing hundreds of billions of dollars every year because multinational corporations and wealthy individuals are able to use tax havens to avoid or underpay tax.
At a time when billionaires are celebrating the new regime in Washington, when it’s crystal clear to anyone with eyes or ears that rich white men have captured the government of the United States, we are compelled to look at corruption as more than just the bribe paid, and to understand that corruption is not just a phenomenon in the public service. It is a defining feature of an economic system that glorifies wealth as the ultimate measure of worth, and encourages behaviours that are
anti-human and irrational in the pursuit of that wealth. We should be as outraged at the corruption of these corporate billionaires as we are at the traffic officer demanding a bribe to not write you a ticket.
In our discussions about accountability practices that will allow ordinary people a say in how their lives are governed, we must be careful to not get stuck at the “stop stealing’ challenge. We have to look beyond public sector corruption and inefficiency and challenge the private sector too. We must call companies and corporations out on their claims that they represent greater efficiency, and demand that they account for the suffering their corrupt practices have caused in so many parts of the world.