On Wednesday, Deputy President Cyril Ramaphosa paid a visit to the National Assembly to answer questions. And when he was asked about corruption, he repeated the worn-out party line: “The ANC is serious about fighting corruption and we aren’t merely paying lip service to the issue.”

Which sounds good, but it’s simply not true.

I would like to share with my fellow countrymen in government some of the things we have learnt about corruption – and the perception of corruption – amongst average South Africans.

At the Democractic Alliance (DA), we spend a huge amount of time speaking to South Africans across the country. We make sure these conversations include every age group, gender and race. We speak to urban dwellers and rural dwellers, we speak to the employed and the unemployed. We speak to DA supporters, African National Congress (ANC) supporters, EFF supporters, Congress of the People supporters, Inkatha Freedom Party supporters. And the reason we do this is so that we do not lose touch with the lives of ordinary South Africans. So that we know what is important to people – what inspires them, what frustrates them, what motivates them and what makes them angry.

When we speak to our people about corruption, they reference Nkandla, the Arms Deal and other big scandals that have made the news. But for the average South African, corruption means being passed over for a short-term government job in favour of someone who either has a connection or affiliation to the person handing out the work, or who has paid this person a kick-back to secure the work. Or the bribery of police that prevents the effective combating of crime, such as the purchasing of dockets to make criminal cases disappear.

For most South Africans, corruption is the unfairness that has been created due to the plain fact that for many individuals to advance, they have to be politically connected.

According to most people we speak to, this happens every day in hundreds of municipalities across South Africa.

Now this highlights two things that we really should pay attention to: Firstly, that even a low-paying, unskilled, short-term contract job is like gold to so many people because they simply cannot find better employment. And secondly, that hundreds of elected representatives think nothing of preying on these people’s desperation by turning the government’s Expanded Public Works Programme (EPWP) jobs allocation into an underground money-making racket.

The EPWP is a government programme which aims to “provide poverty and income relief through temporary work for the unemployed to carry out socially useful activities”, while also helping them with skills development and work experience. It is aimed at unemployed people aged 18 to 35.

But instead of hope and much needed financial relief, the EPWP has come to represent, for many South Africans, the stark reality of the ANC government’s ‘insider vs outsider’ economy. The EPWP has transformed unethical councillors into powerful local kingpins – essentially, mini versions of what they see in national government, where power, prosperity and patronage are the three pillars on which government seems to rest. This also represents the pinnacle of cadre deployment, an ANC policy that has allowed corruption to thrive.

How it normally works is that a contractor will require, say, 10 people for a two-week contract. He or she will then approach the local ward councillor to help fill these temporary vacancies. This councillor then has complete discretion over how this allocation is made, and here the criteria can range from political party membership cards as qualifying identification documents to kickbacks of up to half the contract’s meagre salary to secure the job.

The unfairness of this blatant form of corruption is a huge source of anger in many communities, and the government would be foolish to think that this is not a contributing factor to the many service delivery protests we see every day across South Africa.

Make no mistake, it’s not hard to run the allocation of EPWP jobs fairly and transparently. If the will is there, then it is a relatively simple administrative process to manage a database where unemployed jobseekers can register, and from which the jobs are then randomly allocated. This is how the City of Cape Town manages the allocation of its EPWP jobs. It is a system that prevents the same people from being repeatedly re-employed, and it takes personal contacts and political affiliation completely out of the equation.

But, you see, this won’t do when there’s a buck to be made, and so we continue to see the perpetuation of this insider vs outsider model.

And local government corruption doesn’t end with EPWP jobs. Housing waiting lists are another important source of power and income for these same dirty councillors. In the absence of a transparent waiting list, the allocation of houses is often left to the ward councillor to rule on. In many municipalities, this appears to be totally arbitrary, and reports of large sums of money trading hands are not uncommon. Two years ago, an ANC councillor in Cape Town was caught selling reconstruction and development programme (RDP) houses for R7,000 apiece. He’s now serving a jail sentence. This is appropriate – corruption must be criminally prosecuted.

Again, the establishment of a transparent housing waiting list for each area is not rocket science. In the Western Cape, housing provision is no less a challenge than anywhere else in South Africa, particularly given the rapid rate of urbanisation over the past two decades. But because the DA runs a transparent housing waiting list, there is certainty. People know where they stand.

Between constantly downplaying the extent of government corruption in South Africa and counting on the apathy of the average citizen towards the big corruption headlines, our government has its head buried firmly in the sand when it comes to this angry ticking time bomb. But they are seriously misreading the situation.

Just because ordinary South Africans don’t spend their days venting outrage about the theft of quarter of a billion rands to build the president’s private home, or worrying about the massive corruption opportunities of a R1-trillion nuclear deal, doesn’t mean they don’t care about corruption. It just means that their first concern is the type of corruption that affects them immediately.

Our extensive research has found that issues like Nkandla still feature, but way down the list. At the top of this list of corruption concerns you will find issues like jobs given to family and friends, jobs given in return for ‘cooldrink money’, jobs given based on political affiliation, RDP houses given in return for money, RDP houses given to friends and family and missing or stolen public funds.

These are the things that anger South Africans. This is what corruption means to them.

Corruption is the enemy of progress. It’s the enemy of service delivery. It’s the enemy of equality. It directly affects thousands of poor South Africans every single day. It is not, as our president would desperately like you to believe, a ‘victimless crime’. Corruption is also not only a crime “in the Western paradigm” – another feeble attempt by President Jacob Zuma to downplay his own corruption charges. The victim of corruption is every single person who depends on the government for services, support and social grants.

The example set by Zuma and his close allies in national government is the example followed by ANC officials in all spheres of government. This ANC fish has rotted from the head down and the entire fish now needs to be discarded. Political will to deal with corruption simply does not exist.

One of the DA’s three core values that underpin our vision for South Africa is that of fairness. We envisage a South Africa under the DA where this concept of fairness has a profound effect on every single person’s life. This means both fairness in the way one’s efforts in life are rewarded, and fairness in the way resources and opportunities in our country are shared.

Next year, millions of South Africans will have the opportunity to say no to this ongoing scourge of corruption and yes to fairness. They will have the opportunity to hire a local government that doesn’t tolerate nepotism, waste and theft of public funds. They will have the opportunity to vote for a party that knows the value of clean municipal audits, and knows how important it is to stop its employees from doing business with the state. They will have the opportunity to see the benefit of transparent housing lists, fair EPWP job allocations and the effective prosecution of corruption.

In less than a decade, the DA turned the City of Cape Town around. The city has now received 11 consecutive unqualified audits, and was the only metro to receive a clean audit last year. It is also the only municipality in South Africa in which meetings to adjudicate tenders are open to the public.

The people of Cape Town know the DA difference, and they’re not going back. Now it is the turn of the other big metros like Tshwane, Johannesburg and Nelson Mandela Bay. DM