South Africans feel less likely to see corruption in government today than they were during the 1990s, says the Afrobarometer survey released on Thursday by the Institute for Democracy in South Africa (Idasa).
This response was noted ”despite recent controversies over the so-called Travelgate scandal”, said the survey report.
Travelgate refers to the alleged illegal use of parliamentary travel vouchers by South African MPs — some of whom have been recently prosecuted for fraud.
The survey has been compiled on behalf of Idasa, the Ghana Centre for Democratic Development and Michigan State University’s department of political science. The survey was carried out among 2 400 South Africans face-to-face during October to November 2004.
The survey indicated that where almost half of all South Africans felt in 1997 that all or most national government officials were involved in corruption, just a fifth, or 21%, hold this opinion now.
Where half felt that all or most MPs were involved in corruption as recently as 2000, just a quarter (24%) say so today.
Whereas 25% of South Africans believed there was corruption in the Presidency in 1997, this has dropped to 18% — although this had been at just 13% in 2002.
A considerably larger portion — 36% of all citizens — continue to feel that all or most of the South African Police Service is corrupt.
At the other end of the extreme, just 14% think that judges and magistrates are corrupt.
Placed against the larger context of Afrobarometer readings of public opinion across Africa, South Africans’ views of corruption among elected representatives are far more positive than those measured in countries such as Malawi (36%), Mali (38%) and Nigeria, where 53% of people told the barometer that their MPs were corrupt.
However, African countries such as Cape Verde (8%) and Ghana (13%) appear to have had far greater success in creating an impression of official probity than South African legislators, ”thus showing great room for improvement”. — I-Net Bridge