Bribery is no longer a question of why, but how much

Hardly a week goes by without a headline that leaves one gasping in surprise like Orlando Pirates goalkeeper Siyabonga Mpontshane watching Yusuf Maart’s amazing shot fly over his head on its way to giving Kaizer Chiefs an unlikely Soweto derby victory.

Of course, this is not a soccer column so I should be leaving all speculation about how Mpontshane and his fellow Buccaneers might have felt after their fourth

Soweto derby defeat in a row to BBK Unplugged and others who are intimate with the subject.

Besides, all the focus this morning is on Orlando Pirates consolation victory against AmaZulu FC in the MTN8 final.

One headline that left me wondering if somebody was pulling an April Fool’s prank in November was a tweet by the Sunday Times’s sister radio station, RiseFM.

The Mbombela-based Mpumalanga radio station tweeted last Tuesday: “Driving school operators have shut the gates of the Mbombela traffic department, demanding that bribery money allegedly given to licensing officials not to be increased from R1,700 to R2,000.”

That’s right, you read it. A group of frustrated driving school owners staged a protest — not against corruption at a local licensing department but because the traffic officials had decided to raise the bribe fee by R300.

In other words, the operators have long accepted that to continue being in business in the area they have no option but to grease the palms of the officials. What they object to, according to one of the operators who spoke to a journalist on condition of anonymity, is being forced to pay extra in the prevailing depressed economic climate.

According to the operator, on the day they embarked on the protest the local traffic department facility failed all candidate drivers because they wouldn’t pay the R2,000.

“We can’t pay more because people are poor ... We know they are corrupt and failed all those who didn’t pay a bribe, but we can’t increase it,” an operator was quoted as saying in a subsequent interview with TimesLIVE.

You know you are approaching a point of no return as a nation when criminality has become so endemic that it is regarded as a way of life and people argue about not why they should pay bribes, but how much is fair.

The Mpumalanga story is neither new nor unique. There have been numerous other examples of this phenomenon reported. Not so long ago, a television news programme reported on a police syndicate in Pretoria that offers to “negotiate the release” of stolen or hijacked vehicles in exchange for a fee the legal owner of the vehicle pays them and the criminal gangs they work with.

Bribery and corruption are spreading like a cancer through all spheres of our lives and, unless drastic action is taken, they will soon corrode the very fabric of our society. Though it is true that most of it predates the present political dispensation — bribery was rife at home affairs offices, for example, long before 1994 — this cancer cannot be defeated without first fixing our politics.

The system has become discredited largely because of the many corruption scandals we have had over the years involving high-profile politicians. Too many citizens seem to believe that nothing gets done without a bribe or corruption. They think — with justification given what has emerged from forums such as the Zondo commission — that many of our public representatives and civil servants are in it just to line their pockets.

Yet the reality is that here, like everywhere else in the world, good people outnumber the bad. Even in institutions of state, there are still many honest and decent people who do their work without expecting any underserved reward.

But our bad politics — which has come to be dominated by empty rhetoric, populism and money — is crowding out the good and well-meaning across the board.

Talented people who would otherwise have a great impact in the government at national, provincial and local level, or as part of the opposition in all tiers of government, are being put off public office by the stigma that has come to be associated with holding such positions. As a result, our politics is poorer.

The civil service is losing talent, too, as skilled people seek shelter in the private sector amid concerns that remaining in the public sector eventually results in officials being sucked into politically linked criminal networks whose mission is to milk the state.

We can talk about “incapacitating the state” as much as we like in conferences and summits discussing the country’s future, but unless this culture that has allowed corruption and bribery to be the new normal is rooted out, it is a matter of time before we accept Mobutuism.

It was Zaire’s dictator Mobutu Sese Seko who told his fellow countrymen: “If you want to steal, steal a little cleverly, in a nice way. Only if you steal so much as to become rich overnight, you will be caught.”

Surely we don’t want to stoop that low.