Try China-style prison visits to curtail graft

TIME to stop pussyfooting on graft. If there is one thing we need to import from China it is the country’s approach to dealing with corruption.

The National Treasury’s chief procurement officer, Kenneth Brown, this week told parliament’s standing committee on appropriations that “draconian” new laws are to be introduced to cut down on tender manipulation.

His comments came as he revealed that the Department of Correctional Services had signed off on a R378-million contract to supply and maintain an integrated inmate management system. Brown’s office found a price of around R50-million would have been more realistic, but the department had resisted efforts to review the tender process. He has now instructed correctional services to cancel the contract with Integritron Integrated Solutions, which is part of the Sasstec Group, a company that does lots of business with the state.

Brown should study an experiment in China where gift-giving has been severely curbed and tough measures have been introduced to punish corrupt public servants. Working civil servants are given a day off work to visit former officials jailed for corruption, to learn about their misdeeds and see prison conditions for themselves.

Officials from the central Hubei province recently went on a field trip to visit Lu Xingguo, former head of land resources in the province’s Fang district. He reminded his visitors that they need to “purify their circle of friends and rectify their work relationships”.

Judging by the sudden surge in high-level tourism between South Africa and Dubai, it’s a lesson a growing number of South Africans might take to heart.

While the auditor-general’s annual report points to some R30-billion spent every year on wasteful and fruitless expenditure, it does not measure the amount of money lost through fraud such as tender-rigging and the artificial inflation of prices.

You don’t have to appreciate the aesthetic appeal of either the Nkandla estate or the Italianate mansion built by insurance entrepreneur Douw Steyn on the golf development north of Johannesburg that bears his name, to see who got better value for money. The properties cost about the same to build, but only one of them was properly managed. That’s the difference when you are spending your own money versus someone else’s.

Such is the procurement crisis in the state. It’s public money. If the officials deploying the cash were doing so out of their own pockets, they would be doing it very differently. That’s why the Treasury created the post of chief procurement office to scour tenders of more than R10-million to ensure the state does not overpay.

Procurement fraud is rife across both the public and private sectors and rooting it out is a big earner for law firms, which are expanding their forensic investigation abilities to keep up with demand.

But if the state is serious about tackling corruption it has to get its messaging focused.

In October last year, President Jacob Zuma told a dinner gathering that it was wise to “invest in the ANC” and those who failed to do so would find their business “in danger”. The message was that patronage is the name of the game.

When is a donation just that? Few benefactors contribute cash to a political party without at least some expectation of getting something in return. It makes corruption notoriously hard to identify and prosecute, which is why the work of the chief procurement officer is so important.

Here is a novel idea. Should civil servants be found to have benefited personally from the correctional services contract, they could be the first candidates for a Chinese-style remedial prison sentence. Amid reports of squalor and disease in overcrowded prisons, who better to incarcerate than people who diverted money that could have been used to make that environment more humane? Try explaining that to your cellmates.

Whitfield is an award-winning financial journalist and broadcaster