Hardly a week has gone by in the past few months without a whistle-blower somewhere around the world breaking news.
In India, a young engineer, Satyendra Dubey, who had raised concerns about endemic corruption in the former prime minister’s lead multimillion-dollar road-building project, was found murdered.
In Europe, the vice-president of the European Commission, Neil Kinnock, publicly apologised to Dorte Schmidt Brown, whose whistle-blowing on a major financial abuses at Eurostat, a department of the commission, had initially been ignored.
In the United States, a tip-off from an insider alerted the government to a new, undetectable anabolic steroid designed to help sports stars cheat their way to the top.
In Australia, an employee at National Australia Bank was praised for revealing the identity of four traders who had concealed losses of $180-million.
In Britain, just months after the apparent suicide of whistle-blower David Kelly created the biggest enquiry into the British system of government, another, Katherine Gun, was released after a year in jail awaiting a trial that, in the end, the government feared too much to pursue.
It was Gun who chose to break the Official Secrets Act by passing to the media a copy of the e-mail exchange between American and British intelligence in which they agreed to spy on the representatives of the United Nations Security Council and UN Secretary General Kofi Annan in the build-up to the vote on the war in Iraq.
And finally, in Israel, Mordechai Vanunu was released last month after 17 years in prison, many of them in solitary confinement. His offence was to have revealed details of Israel’s secret nuclear arms programme. To the Israeli government he remains a traitor; to sensible people concerned about the instability and peril of the region, he was — and is — a hero.
As a further breach of his human rights, Vanunu is forbidden to speak to foreigners or to leave the country. People in power are scared of whistle-blowers — individuals who have the strength of character and the guts to speak out about something that is plain wrong. This demonstrates that the prognosis for whistle-blowers is still precarious; for every survivor there is a victim. This is an improvement. Until relatively recently there was only one category: victims.
Now, there is even a super-category: celebrity survivors.
Sherron Watkins, who provides an exclusive account of her experience as a whistle-blower at Enron in a new book on the state of the art, Whistle-Blowing around the World*, found herself on the front page of Time magazine at the end of 2002, along with two other US whistle-blowers, FBI staff attorney Colleen Rowley and Cynthia Cooper of Worldcom.
This represented a potentially important turning point for whistle-blowers. Changing public consciousness of their role is crucial and positive publicity, such as that of the Time piece, is valuable.
The subject is too often shrouded in mythology or contorted social mores. Whistle-blowers disturb the settled social weave, where loyalty trumps principle, and speaking out is regarded as ‘maverick” or another form of ‘otherness”. In South Africa, as in many societies, a whistle-blower is thought of as an impimpi.
It is hard for people to break ranks, as the book’s narrative from Victoria Johnson — who blew the whistle on Peter Marais’s street-naming scandal in 2001 — shows. When they do, reprisals such as dismissal or harassment are common, although Johnson emerged shaken but largely unscathed and with a clear sense that she ‘would do it again”.
Most whistle-blowers tend to be professionals. With jobs so scarce, it is hardly surprising that workers are reluctant to risk their livelihoods.
The law is an important, but blunt, instrument. South Africa has a conceptually modern law, the Protected Disclosures Act 2000. But while the public sector is doing reasonably well, with the Public Service Commission leading the way with a programme of training and awareness-building, the private sector has yet to come to the party.
Corruption or wrongdoing is harmful to workers and to bosses; when companies suffer a loss or reputation or close, workers as well as owners are harmed. In practical terms, it means creating a new culture where speaking out is seen as the responsible thing to do.
Those few companies that have broached the subject have tended to take the lazy, counter-productive route of outsourcing, typically with external so-called ‘hotlines”.
Such lines are premised on anonymity, whereas the law invites internal disclosures in person, if necessary confidentially (to be distinguished from anonymously).
Anonymity provides a convenient cloak for the malevolent. Moreover, it signals to employees that management does not trust itself with the responsibility of listening and investing in a serious change of internal culture.
Rarely, if ever, is the hotline backed by investigative capacity. Those who do raise genuine concerns tend to be disappointed.
Not that the public sector is perfect. When, a couple of years ago, prison governor Tatolo Setlai blew the whistle on extraordinary levels of corruption among his prison warders, he was rewarded with a public rebuke and suspension.
Then, describing him as ‘a bad man”, the Scorpions arrested him. Yet the charges were relatively minor and very stale, and he is still awaiting trial despite promises to bring him to court quickly — thereby sending out the chilling message to potential whistle-blowers: ‘Don’t do it, don’t rock the boat.” It is outrageous, irresponsible conduct by the National Prosecuting Authority.
When whistle-blowers are not listened to, then people die or are otherwise harmed.
There is always a witness, usually a silent one — but the question is whether they will speak out. And, in turn, have those with power created a safe alternative to silence?
* Co-edited by Richard Calland and Guy Dehn, Whistle-Blowing around the World: Law, Culture & Practice is available from the Idasa bookshop on Tel: (021) 467 5600. The Open Democracy Advice Centre provides free, confidential advice to whistle-blowers on Tel: (021) 467 5673