Our task is to convert the corrupt

by Editor · April 2, 2014

A series of reports issued by the Office of the Public Protector over the past few months has placed on the record the various ways in which taxpayers’ money is misused, to the point of illegality, and in which some public offices and institutions are singularly failing to serve the nation.

Graphic: Transparency International

South Africans must condemn the misallocation of our money to finance one man’s luxury citadel, the disheartening failure and abdication of responsibility at the SABC, the smelly fisheries deals, and even the mischief at the Independent Electoral Commission.

We must register our protest above the din of mealy-mouthed justification and the cynical smears of public protector Thuli Madonsela by people with no ethical backbone.

South Africans should be angry with those who abuse their power and ransack our national treasury, and with those people who diverted funding intended for service delivery projects to the construction works at the presidential homestead.

At the same time, we must be proud of our democracy where the Chapter 9 institutions, the press and civil society are able to reveal shady dealings in government under the protection of the Constitution.

Not many democracies have the constitutional structures to enforce that kind of transparency and (at least notional) accountability. South Africans must stridently protect this.

On the other hand, we must be concerned that there is so much dishonesty among officials who administer services paid for by taxpayers.

Corruption is commonly defined as the abuse of public office for private gain. It is a human impulse to behave dishonestly in order to obtain financial and other gain.

Our faith tells us that this is due to original sin. Social scientists who do research into crime of all kinds imply the same thing when they observe that crime and corruption are based on human weakness which spans cultures, countries and generations.

In South Africa the question has long ceased to be whether there is corruption in public office, but how much, of what nature and to what impact.

Corruption pervades and corrodes the entire system, from top to bottom. Countless official and media reports into the civil service have revealed that laws and rules are bent and evaded in many ways by some government employees who readily solicit and accept bribes.

Those who engage in corruption are, it is needless to state, the enemy of the people. But they also do harm to their honest colleagues.

Even one corrupt official can make an entire department seem dishonest, a case of one rotten apple spoiling the barrel.

From the moral point of view it is the individual’s personal integrity that protects organisations from corrupt practices. But temptation and opportunism can be overwhelming, especially in an atmosphere where dishonesty is tolerated and credible role models are not much in evidence.

It is within this culture of impunity that Christians find it a challenging prospect to teach and encourage the observance of the virtues of truthfulness, honesty, personal integrity and respect for the rights of others.

Pope Francis last year offered startling guidance in this when he forthrightly spoke out against corruption.

Those who take kickbacks have lost their dignity and give their children dirty bread, he said in November. He compared corruption to drug addiction: We might start with a small bribe, but it’s like a drug.

The corrosive effects corruption has on the soul of those who engage in it ought to prompt us to work on their conversion to a life of ethics.

This is a tall order, since the corrupt tend to justify themselves. Pope Francis pointed this out when he was still Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio: A sinner expects forgiveness. The corrupt, on the contrary, don’t because they don’t feel they have sinned. They have prevailed.

Cecil John Rhodes once said, cynically and no doubt from vast experience, that every man has his price. This notion did not die with him. That is why we must all work ardently to prove him wrong.