SA still in bad books for corruption

Appalling 2020 Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI) results were released yesterday by Transparency International, emphasising the extent to which corruption has affected the ability of countries to monitor their healthcare responses to Covid-19.

David Lewis, executive director at Corruption Watch, said graft had to be fought in the ANC first.

“Corruption in the ANC has to be tackled, otherwise the public will not believe that corruption is being tackled; and corruption will certainly continue to increase.”

Lewis said if the government did not monitor the roll-out of the vaccines, this would negatively affect the CPI the following year

“If the government messes up the distributions of the vaccines in the same way that they did with the purchase and distributions of the PPE, then the CPI will worsen next year,” he said.

South Africa is still at a low score of 44 and at a rank of 69, alongside Bulgaria, Hungary, Jamaica, Romania and Tunisia.

For the past eight years, the country has more or less stagnated at 44, forming part of the twothirds of countries with a score below 50, showing concerning levels of corruption.

In the previous CPI, the country scored 44. In 2018 and 2017 it scored 43. The year prior to that, South Africa managed to get a score of 45.

Liezl Groenewald, a business ethicist at Ethics Institute, said corruption in South Africa was rife because people’s behaviour was determined and influenced by their values and the values of the society in which they live.

“If societal values make it okay for people to steal, then they will do so. It is also about being extrinsically motivated by greed and by ‘the self’. Ethics requires that we act in ways that are good for ‘the self’ and good for others,” said Groenewald.

She added that the ANC needed to lead by example in the fight against corruption.

“The world has lost trust in South Africa due to its high levels of corruption. This, of course, impacts foreign investment and job creation,” she said.

“For our economy to recover, we need to demonstrate that the country/its leadership is serious about changing the current culture of corruption. Talk is cheap.”

The world has lost trust in South Africa due to its high levels of corruption; and that impacts foreign investment.

Liezl Groenewald Ethics Institute