Government on Wednesday officially launched its Country Corruption Assessment Report (CCAR) on South Africa, but warned the document has ”serious shortcomings” and is based on inadequate data.
The 148-page CCAR, which has taken two years to prepare, is a joint effort between government and the southern African regional office of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC).
Among its main findings are that corruption appears to have increased in South Africa, and that both private citizens and business perceive members of the police force to be the most corrupt public service officials in the country.
According to the CCAR, ”there is no doubt that South Africans perceive that there is a lot of corruption”.
It says 41% of those surveyed saw corruption as ”one of the most important problems which should be addressed”, while 39% believed it to be a ”common occurrence”.
A total of 11% of households surveyed in 2001 said they had experienced corruption, compared to a figure of two percent obtained in a similar survey three years earlier.
”The public servants most associated with corruption, both for the citizens and businesses, appear to be the police.
”All surveys indicate that police officers are the most vulnerable to corruption, followed by customs, local government, home affairs and court officials.
”The majority of those surveyed felt that government was not doing enough to combat corruption. However, this perception is not uniform across ethnic groups and is held mainly by specific communities,” the report says.
Briefing MPs and the media on the report at Parliament on Wednesday, Deputy Provincial and Local Government Minister Ntombazana Botha said the fight against corruption was ”one of government’s top priorities”.
However, the CCAR suffered from some ”serious shortcomings”.
”We don’t have adequate data… there are things we still need to put in a report like this,” Botha said.
Among other findings of the report are:
that a third of home affairs officials ”admitted to having been approached with a bribe”;
that a total of 39% of businesses surveyed cite crime as a major obstacle to operating in South Africa, of which almost two-thirds mentioned corruption and fraud;
that sectors experiencing the most bribes are construction, agriculture, forestry and fishing; and,
that between 20% and 50% of public service officials think the public always seeks a ”back-door solution”.
The CCAR, which aims to ”serve as a baseline to measure progress in combating and preventing corruption”, says no central database of incidents of corruption, nor of related disciplinary or criminal cases, exists in South Africa.
”The attempt to present a comprehensive assessment was severely hampered by a lack of information from the business and civil society sectors, resulting in a strong public sector bias in the assessment,” the report says.
Public Service and Administration Minister Geraldine Fraser-Moleketi is set to present the CCAR to Deputy President Jacob Zuma on Wednesday afternoon. ‒ Sapa