South Africa has emerged with good marks in an international report card on corruption, openness and accountability in 25 countries.
The Centre for Public Integrity (CPI) released its first Global Integrity report this week and placed South Africa sixth overall, making it the only developing country to score highly enough to enter the group of states characterised as having “strong” levels of public accountability.
Bottom of the list, which only considered countries at least nominally regarded as democracies, came Zimbabwe, characterised, together with Guatemala, as “very weak”.
The CPI is an independent organisation that does investigative reporting and research on public policy issues in the United States and around the world. The Global Access project that produced the report is led by South African researcher Marianne Camerer.
The scoring is based on six areas identified as important for supporting public integrity and preventing corruption: the vibrancy of civil society, the freedom of the media and access to information and media; electoral and political processes; the correct functioning of branches of government; administration and civil service; the existence and independence of oversight and regulatory mechanisms; and finally specific anti-corruption measures and respect for the rule of law.
A closer reading of the report, however, suggests little room for complacency as the qualitative assessments, often written by leading national investigative journalists, undercut the positive score attained by the formal architecture of accountability in many countries. One is left with a global sense of what the report calls “imperfect democracies”, where the unifying norm is the tendency of political and business elites to use the system to enrich themselves.
What distinguishes the US from Zimbabwe is less the levels of corruption and more the greater sophistication and restrained ruthlessness of the grubbing at the public trough — as well as the greater ability of a very rich country to sustain such abuse.
Thus, while the US scores highest overall in supporting the formal institutions of democracy and accountability, this assessment is tempered by a biting critical analysis of the way in which vested interests have established a kind of “legal” corruption in that country.
This critique, written by CPI founder Charles Lewis, charts how the US has institutionalised a system of industry lobbyists and election campaign funding that has virtually fused the interests of big business and party politics, to the detriment of ordinary citizens.
In a statement that carries more than a few echoes for South Africa, Lewis warns that because the Republicans have managed to exert “tightly disciplined control” over the entire national government “there is a powerful disincentive against political independence, candour, or even curiosity, lest it be misinterpreted as disloyal criticism”.
He notes, for example, that none of the US’s much-touted institutions of oversight “held any hearings or issued any reports regarding those highly publicised, controversial contracts in Iraq [going] to major campaign contributors”.
Similar caveats apply to the generally upbeat South African assessment, written by Camerer.
She notes that: “Almost a decade after transition to democratic rule, South Africa has a vibrant and active civil society and progressive and diverse media, unfettered in keeping vigilant watch over those in power. With the right of access to information assured by the Constitution and the Promotion of Access to Information Act, the safeguards to secure an open society in which all citizens can enjoy their rights of freedom of expression and association are guaranteed in law, and exercised in practice.”
However, she notes that government departments have responded poorly to a recent test of access to information: 61% of public bodies polled did not respond to requests filed under the Act, and the legal measures required to enforce compliance are “both time-consuming and beyond the financial means of most citizens”.
Where South Africa falls down most markedly compared with other states is in the category of electoral processes, where the lack of rules for the receipt and disclosure of party funding is the main area of failure.
However, in the latter case, given the example of the US, where the deleterious effect of influence-buying has arguably hardly been lessened by its open and public nature, it seems that disclosure on its own is not enough.
Comments from South African journalists and watch-dog NGOs —such as the Eastern Cape’s Public Service Accountability Monitor —which are appended to Camerer’s assessment paint a slightly more pessimistic picture.
Says one: “A number of developments have arisen in this period, which represent cause for concern. These include: the centralisation of state power within an expanded presidency and the increasing concentration of political power within the ruling party’s executive committee; the weakening of parliamentary oversight committees and increasing passivity of constitutional protection bodies [such as the Office of the Public Protector], particularly in regard to cases of corruption and impropriety involving members of the executive; the increasing reliance by civil society and marginalised sectors of South African society on the intervention of the Constitutional Court as a means of ensuring access to public services and socio-economic rights; and an increasingly fragmented and passive civil society.”
While Camerer notes the freedom of civil society organisations to mobilise, other commentators note with concern the measures taken by the state to spy on and intimidate more radical organisations such as the Landless People’s Movement.
Both Camerer and her peer-reviewers note the severe test placed on South Africa’s institutions of accountability by the arms deal imbroglio, including the decision not to prosecute Deputy President Jacob Zuma.
However, a glance at other countries, such as Italy, which scored higher than South Africa, is somewhat reassuring — or perhaps equally dismaying.
A report by Italian journalist Leo Sisti provides an absolutely scathing account of how Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi has shamelessly manipulated legal and political processes to escape and postpone charges of corruption relating to the bribery of two sets of judges — and to make further investigation and prosecution more difficult.
Corruption, it seems, knows no national or cultural boundaries.