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DISCUSSING CORRUPTION

Institutions hobbled by State Capture need to be repurposed

Institutions hobbled by State Capture need to be repurposed
Beating corruption requires taking seriously the psychological legacies of apartheid and dismantling the socio-economic ones, says the writer.

Political analysts and academics Amanda Gouws, Judith February and Lukas Muntingh gathered on Tuesday 19 March to discuss how endemic corruption is, what political parties propose to do about it in their election manifestos and why the electoral system needs to change.

State Capture is the re-purposing of state institutions for the benefit of the elite,” said Stellenbosch University Professor Amanda Gouws at a panel discussion on corruption and the upcoming elections in Cape Town on Tuesday.

State Capture means that institutions don’t deliver their mandate,” said Gouws. The consequences of state capture are far-reaching, money was wasted, projects were not completed, institutions were debilitated.

As an example, the Department of Women has not been able to “institutionalise” the council for gender-based violence, said Gouws. The national council for gender-based violence was launched in 2012. It was supposed to “integrate, strengthen and mobilise structures of societies for the reduction of (gender-based violence) through the implementation of coherent strategies.” By 2015 it remained an “unfunded mandate”, with the Sonke Gender Justice group saying that apathy from government stakeholders and lack of political will meant that “not a single rand has been allotted by Treasury to address a problem that costs the South African economy between R28.4-billion and R42.4-billion annually”.

With multiple commissions of inquiry and the extensive work done by investigative journalists, we know the extent of the corruption in our state-owned institutions, Gouws told the gathering, organised by the Institute of Security Studies, the Catholic Parliamentary Liaison Office and the Hanns Seidel Foundation.

Panellist Judith February, a research associate at the Institute for Security Studies, said there was a common awareness about the problems around corruption.

We all know what’s wrong, (we know) what has gone wrong. How do we re-purpose institutions? People are getting impatient, it’s been a year since the New Dawn.”

The role of the NPA

Professor Lukas Muntingh, an associate professor at UWC, said that in rooting out corruption it was important that the National Prosecuting Authority (NPA) was independent and able to do its work “without fear or favour”.

The NPA, established in 1998, has not had a national director of public prosecutions (NDPP) finish a full 10-year term. Shamila Batohi recently took over the reins after the Constitutional Court declared the NDPP office vacant, which led to Shaun Abrahams leaving the post.

The appointment of the NDPP is at the discretion of the president. It has been riddled with political appointments. “It needs to be de-politicised” said Muntingh.

Referring to the manifestos of political parties contesting the elections in less than seven weeks, Muntingh said that the ANC and EFF manifestos mention the NPA once, the DA mentions it five times and Cope doesn’t mention it at all.

The DA manifesto proposes that the appointment and removal of the NDPP should be a parliamentary function. “This hits the nail on the head”, said Muntingh.

The president has too much power in appointments [even] when it comes to other Chapter 9 institutions like the Commission for Gender Equality and the Human Rights Commission,” said Muntingh. What needed to happen was the “repurposing of institutions [because] we can’t rely on individuals to ensure transparency”.

The electoral system

There are slate politics. That’s about who gets on to the slate and that is about loyalty,” said Gouws, who highlighted how problematic it was that leaders were “more loyal to the people who put the [candidate party] lists together”.

The Western Cape High Court is hearing a case in which the applicants are arguing that independent candidates should be able to stand for election. The applicants, the New Nation Movement, argue that independent candidates who don’t have faith in political parties, but want to make a change, should have the opportunity to be elected.

The applicants’ critique of the current electoral system is similar to Gouws’s — that people become more loyal to political parties to the cost of the people they should be representing.

We have to think about how we socialise children. We need to socialise children to have a moral compass, otherwise, they become adults without a moral compass,” said Gouws. DM

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