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Opinionista

Has corruption become so pervasive that it needs mediation?

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Oscar van Heerden is a scholar of International Relations (IR), where he focuses on International Political Economy, with an emphasis on Africa, and SADC in particular. He completed his PhD and Masters studies at the University of Cambridge (UK). His undergraduate studies were at Turfloop and Wits. He is currently a Deputy Vice-Chancellor at Fort Hare University and writes in his personal capacity.

The problem of corruption is so common throughout our society that talking about and engaging with it at a high level is but one of the aspects of that corruption. It is when it is also equally enthusiastically practised at the local level that it becomes much more dangerous.

Corruption – can we mediate it?

Yes, you heard me: can we mediate it and not necessarily destroy it completely? For it seems to me that every society, whether in the global north or global south, cannot do without some measure of corruption. Take New Zealand, for example, which is at the top of the Transparency International indices of corruption. This does not at all suggest that there are absolutely no corrupt practices taking place in that country.

If we accept this hypothesis to be true, then we must look at what the real causes of corruption are and how indeed we can mediate it.

In wanting to understand this phenomenon it seems generally accepted that there exist five types of corrupt practices:

  • Corruption of principles;
  • Corruption of moral behaviour;
  • Corruption of people;
  • Corruption of organisations (public and private); and,
  • Corruption of the state (national/societal/cultural).

Corruption of principles is perhaps the very worst form of corruption since we as individuals are generally guided by our principles in life. If these indeed become corrupted, meaning you no longer adhere to such principles, we can safely assume that you can then entertain corrupt and unacceptable behaviours. In other words, if you compromise on your principles, you can be influenced to do just about anything that is wrong.

One of my principles in life has always been to work towards a good society, where everyone lives in peace and has their equal share of social justice. But if this principle is corrupted because someone offers me lots of money and satisfies my need for accumulation, then a good society is not going to be the end result of my pursuit.

Which brings me to the next: corruption of moral behaviour. Here, as highlighted above, you become corrupt and it begins to affect the way you behave. Morals, suddenly, are questioned and you constantly find ways to rationalise immoral behaviour. You begin to have no regard for the next person. In this respect, three pertinent questions are being asked:

  • How can you ensure ethical leadership, good governance and accountability in business and government?
  • How can directors and management play a key role in reducing fraud and corruption?
  • What are the best practices for fraud prevention, audit, compliance and investigations?

These are pertinent questions because corrupt practices are rife within our society at large. The necessary leadership, both politically and in the corporate world, are sorely lacking.

The corruption of people – this is what the Guptas did best, corrupt people in all facets of their lives, both in the public and private sectors. The corruption of organisations was also fairly easy in South Africa these past few years. Political parties, state institutions and indeed the private sector colluded in this regard and because of all these forms of corruption, the final practice of corruption is the corruption of the state. Here what is meant by the state is the national psyche of all citizens, culturally and of course societally. Once this happens, we will be too far gone for any recovery, let alone mediation of corruption.

I need not remind any of you that inequality must surely be a huge contributory factor to the levels of corruption we are experiencing in South Africa.

There are two main arguments that posit this matter of inequality. According to Thomas Piketty, the right-wing free-market position is that, in the long run, market forces, individual initiative and productivity growth are the sole determinants of the distribution of income and standard of living. This applies in particular to the least well-off members of society, hence government efforts to redistribute wealth should be limited and should rely on instruments that interfere as little as possible with the virtuous mechanisms of the market – instruments, such as Milton Friedman’s negative income tax (1962).

The traditional left-wing position, passed down from nineteenth-century socialist theory and trade union practice, holds that the only way to alleviate the misery of the poorest members of capitalist society is through social and political struggle and that the redistributive efforts of the government must penetrate to the very heart of the productive process. Opponents of the system must challenge the market forces that determine the profits of capitalism and the unequal remuneration of workers, for instance, by nationalising the means of production or setting strict wage schedules.

It seems to me then that it does boil down to the banality of bad leadership all around, hence we have high levels of corruption in our society. So, how do we turn this phenomenon from a tragedy of the commons to positive action?

In The Prince, Machiavelli reminds us that a leader, any leader, needs to surround himself with three types of friends: very intelligent ones, the manipulator types and the straight-talking/tell-it-like-it-is types. The intelligent ones bring new ideas and innovation to the party. The manipulator types do the leader’s “bad work”, especially the sort of stuff he cannot be associated with, and the straight talkers are the ones who tell the leader all those things no-one else wants to tell him, in other words, the sort of criticism he does not want to hear.

Do our leaders today have such friends?

The problem of corruption is so pervasive throughout our society that talking about and engaging with it at a high level is but one of the aspects of corruption. It is when it is also equally enthusiastically practised at our local level that it becomes much more dangerous.

Where indeed do we draw the line? Ethical leadership is what some say is required.

Leaders, both private and political, need to lead by example and the fact of the matter is that neither do, what with all this collusive behaviour by our corporate leaders. Anything to make a quick buck. Therein lies the problem.

I am reminded of Thabo Mbeki’s Nelson Mandela Annual Lecture in 2006, in which he attempted to dissect the very nature of this corrosive blight on our society. He stated then that, in this regard, “we are speaking of the observations made by the political economists that, since the onset of capitalism in England, the values of the capitalist market, of individual profit maximisation, had tended to displace the values of human solidarity”.

In despair at this development, RH Tawney wrote in his famous book, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism:

To argue, in the manner of Machiavelli, that there is one rule for business and another for private life, is to open the door to an orgy of unscrupulousness before which the mind recoils… (Yet) granted that I should love my neighbour as myself, the questions which, under modern conditions of large-scale (economic) organisation, remain for solution are, Who precisely is my neighbour? And, How exactly am I to make my love for him effective in practice?

To these questions, the conventional religious teaching supplied no answer, for it had not even realised that they could be put… Religion had not yet learned to console itself for the practical difficulty of applying its moral principles, by clasping the comfortable formula that for the transactions of economic life no moral principles exist.”

He goes on: “In his well-known book, The Great Transformation, in a chapter headed ‘Market and Man’, Karl Polanyi went on to say: ‘To separate labour from other activities of life and to subject it to the laws of the market was to annihilate all organic forms of existence and to replace them by a different type of organisation, an atomistic and individualist one.

“‘Such a scheme of destruction was best served by the application of the principle of freedom of contract. In practice, this meant that the non-contractual organisations of kinship, neighbourhood, profession, and creed were to be liquidated since they claimed the allegiance of the individual and thus restrained his freedom.

“‘To represent this principle as one of non-interference, as economic liberals were wont to do, was merely the expression of an ingrained prejudice in favour of a definite kind of interference, namely, such as would destroy non-contractual relations between individuals and prevent the spontaneous reformation.’”

In the foreword to a recent edition of this book, Joseph Stiglitz says: “Polanyi stresses a particular defect in the self-regulating economy that only recently has been brought back into the discussion. It involves the relationship between the economy and society, with how economic systems, or reforms, can affect how individuals relate to one another. Again, as the importance of social relations has increasingly become recognised, the vocabulary has changed. We now talk, for instance, about social capital.”

The central point made by Polanyi is that the capitalist market destroys relations of “kinship, neighbourhood, profession, and creed”, replacing these with the pursuit of personal wealth by citizens who, as he says, have become “atomistic and individualistic”.

And so, when one examines the three questions at the beginning of this article and attempts to answer each, the questions indeed must be: have our political and corporate leaders become atomistic and individualistic in their respective roles? Have they lost all compassion for their fellow citizens and is it indeed simply just about getting rich at all costs?

In this ocean of despair, shall we allow ourselves to be blown this way and that way, allowing these corrupt leaders to thrive unabated?

I conclude with the famous words of Mbeki in his Mandela lecture:

Thus, every day, and during every hour of our time beyond sleep, the demons embedded in our society, that stalk us at every minute, seem always to beckon each one of us towards a realisable dream and nightmare. With every passing second, they advise, with rhythmic and hypnotic regularity – get rich! get rich! get rich!

And thus has it come about that many of us accept that our common natural instinct to escape from poverty is but the other side of the same coin on whose reverse side are written the words – at all costs, get rich!” DM

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