Maybe all is not lost; perhaps the tide of corruption can be reversed. The events in North Africa and the Middle East have made anything seem possible. Opinion pieces are appearing in the pages of the Gulf News complaining about systemic corruption in Saudi Arabia – until now, a no-go zone.
India, to many a lost cause given the endemic character of the problem, has witnessed the remarkable campaign spurred by Anna Hazare’s hunger strike to force the government to agree to set up a 10-person committee, with five drawn from civil society, to redraft a Bill that has been pending for 42 long years to establish an ombud institution with wide-ranging powers to investigate and punish corruption.
So, the recent call from the Council for the Advancement of the South African Constitution (Casac) to establish a new single, independent anti-corruption body may not be the wishful-thinking initiative that some immediately assumed.
Casac’s campaign was launched the week before the Constitutional Court judgment in the Glenister matter, in which the court found that insufficient independence rendered the legislation establishing the Hawks as the replacement for the Scorpions unconstitutional. Casac got lucky: the court was divided (five to four), but no matter, the judgment, against which there is no appeal of course, added succour and momentum to Casac’s campaign.
Now the debate can really begin, against the backdrop of the 18-month period the court has set for Parliament to right its constitutional wrong. It will do so with gritted teeth, no doubt. But it is a chance for the national legislature to redeem itself and provide an answer to the question: is it a lap-dog to the Zumaites or not?
Meanwhile, other important institutions are also girding their loins for the fight ahead.
At a time when there is so much disheartening news about the state of governance, it is important to recognise those institutions that are doing the job that we have set for them.
Hence, it was encouraging to read the piece in this newspaper a fortnight ago (“Time for change in construction“) by Tembinkosi Bonakele and Simon Roberts, the deputy commissioner and chief economist respectively of the Competition Commission. This is a serious institution that is performing strongly, combining expertise with real independence.
Limited profile
Apart from the notorious bread price-fixing case last year, which brought the commission wider attention and applause, its public profile tends to be limited to the pages of the business press and to the chief executives and corporate lawyers who are its bread and butter. The commission seems to be willing to call a spade a spade and to go where others fear to tread. Its words on these pages could not have been more lucid: “There is no doubt now that the culture of collusion in the construction sector is so endemic that no single prosecution is going to root it out.”
The commission’s intentions in this sector chime well with an international initiative that has just completed a two-year pilot period and which has surpassed most expectations. With the zesty strapline, “Get What You Pay For”, the Construction Sector Transparency Initiative (CoST) has dragged into the sunlight key project information relating to 87 infrastructure projects in seven countries — ranging from new roads in Vietnam and new universities and hospitals in Ethiopia to dams in Tanzania — revealing serious problems relating to procurement practice, budget and time overruns and professional negligence in terms of project design and quality.
Most importantly, the disclosure of information has laid a platform for public engagement in which questions can now be asked of both the government procuring entities and the private-sector consultants and contractors. CoST has learned from the mistakes of its parent, the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI), and has been able to move further faster, even though the interests at stake are barely less intense.
Infrastructure is one of the biggest and most effective drivers of development and a necessary if not sufficient precondition for progress and prosperity. But it is also a big driver of corruption, given the scale of the projects and the complexity of the value chain.
As development doyen Professor Paul Collier puts it: “The construction sector is hugely strategic in the development of a country. Not only does corruption in the construction sector push up unit costs, it spills over into the political realm to produce a dysfunctional political class.”
Standards of conduct
He points to Nigeria where $600-billion in oil revenue ostensibly went through the construction sector but left the West African giant no less poor. Collier warns that the commodity booms that are likely to festoon the next decade will provoke more harmful boom-construction-corruption cycles unless new standards of conduct can be instilled in the key actors.
Importantly, the United Kingdom is one of the CoST countries, demonstrating that these transnational issues of transparency and accountability encompass so-called developed countries as well as the global south. This helps accommodate the criticism that has been made of the EITI that it focuses unduly on “host” countries, where the oil or gas is excavated, the bribes are siphoned away and the companies that ply their trade and pay the bribes – and insufficiently on the “home” countries where the companies are supposed to pay their tax and be regulated.
Nevertheless, after eight long years, the EITI is beginning to get traction. As the validation process for information about oil and gas revenue that has been disclosed unfolds and countries are declared “compliant”, so the credibility of the whole exercise increases.
Moreover, in regions of Ghana, for example, communities are now able to argue on the basis of disaggregated EITI information that the revenue from extraction in their region should be spent on developing specific local schools and hospitals and not filched away in the general national budget.
People ask: why is South Africa not a part of the EITI, as 35 other countries are? Given the size and reach of its extractives industry, South Africa clearly should be. Now is the time to join the club. It was probably some misguided Mbeki-ist assertion of sovereignty that led to South Africa declining an earlier invitation to join.
South Africa should have nothing to fear: multi-stakeholder dialogue is in the political and social DNA of this country. It helped secure a negotiated transition, it delivered a Constitution that enjoys substantial legitimacy and, more recently, it helped secure a bold consensus between government, the private sector and the leading environmental NGOs on South Africa’s emissions-reduction targets. (See Stef Raubenheimer’s book Facing Climate Change: Building SA’s Strategy, published recently by the Institute for Democracy in Africa).
Getting tough on corruption means getting the institutional arrangements right. It also means homing in on the key sectoral drivers of corruption, just as the Competition Commission is doing, while being creative and open minded about the process. Opportunities to use CoST and the EITI should be taken so as to build a cross-sector consensus about the way to set and maintain high standards of transparency and accountability.
Richard Calland is associate professor in the public law department at the University of Cape Town