South Africa’s corruption problem is not a failure of law. Rather, it is a failure of conscience.
Over the past decade, we have seen inquiry after inquiry, commission after commission, strategy after strategy, from the Zondo Commission to the latest anti-corruption frameworks, yet the rot persists.
If all the evidence in the current Madlanga Commission is to be believed, then South Africa needs some serious self-reflection. The problem is not that the country lacks rules. Of those, we have enough. But now we hear that the very people who should be enforcing the laws may be rotten to the core. Clearly, laws without integrity are of little value.
As a country, we lack the shared commitment to integrity and accountability that should guide the application of those rules. We need a moral anchor. Corruption has become more than a crime. It is a symptom of ethical decay, a slow unravelling of the country’s social contract.
South Africans love drama (if soap opera viewership is anything to go by). And true to this characteristic, we tell the story of corruption through the spectacular: the State Capture networks, the looted SOEs, the construction mafia and the tenders that never delivered. But the real danger begins long before the headlines. It starts in the ordinary compromises that South Africans make daily: the queue skipped with a bribe, the tender winked through for a friend, the silence when we see something wrong.
These micro-corruptions build the culture in which grand corruption thrives. When citizens begin to see dishonesty as survival rather than betrayal, the moral economy collapses and law becomes a blunt instrument.
Our anti-corruption institutions are many: the Special Investigating Unit, the National Prosecuting Authority, the Hawks, the Auditor-General and the Public Protector. On paper, South Africa has one of the most comprehensive anti-corruption architectures in the developing world, yet corruption continues to mushroom.
Morality cannot be outsourced
Why? Because laws can only police behaviour; they cannot cultivate virtue. The late Archbishop Desmond Tutu warned that morality cannot be outsourced to the courts. It must live in our choices, our workplaces and our daily habits of decency and kindness.
Until ethics becomes habit and not instruction, the best laws will remain little more than paperwork masking the rot.
Leadership in both government and business sets the tone for society. When leaders cut corners or protect cronies, they give permission for everyone else to do the same.
South Africa’s moral crisis is as much about weak ethics at the top as it is about poverty at the bottom. This erosion of moral leadership has consequences, such as investors withdrawing, communities losing faith, and citizens retreating into anger or apathy. Corruption does not just empty the fiscus, it empties the soul of the nation.
South Africa’s next great reconstruction project must be ethical, not merely institutional or regulatory.
Ethics must be woven into education, leadership training, boardroom discussions and public discourse – not as theory, but as lived practice. Every person’s DNA must be infused with ethics and integrity.
The private sector must go beyond the glossy brochures of “corporate social responsibility” and face an uncomfortable truth: capitalism without conscience corrodes democracy. Ethical capitalism is not philanthropy. It is survival.
Ethical renewal cannot be imposed from above; it must be practised from below. It starts with every citizen who refuses to participate in corruption. Each act of honesty, each refusal to bribe, each insistence on fairness chips away at the culture of complicity that sustains corruption.
Democracy is not only defended in courts or parliaments, but in the moral choices of ordinary people. That is where South Africa’s rebirth must begin. Legislation can punish wrongdoing, but only ethics can stop it from happening in the first place. DM