Corruption in SA is not a crisis — it’s a system we’ve built

Before I was born, my father had to move from his home. Polygamy was the reason. My mother was moved too — by the poverty that came after, scavenging for work hundreds of kilometres away. By the time I arrived, what should have been overhead was already gone. I was something like an abandoned building without a roof, waiting for a reason to remain standing against the elements of neglect.

The walls were up. The doors were hung. From the street, I looked like a child going about his life. But the covering had been removed before I was old enough to know what was missing — and a structure with no covering does not announce its damage right away. It waits.

I think about that often now, when I read the headlines:

Senior law enforcement officials suspended.
Investigations launched.
Public outrage briefly reignited.

And then — as always — we move on.

But we shouldn’t.

Because what we are watching is not a series of isolated failures. It is the predictable outcome of a structure that has been allowed to form over time. Walls up. Doors hung. Lights on. And somewhere along the line, the covering removed.

As an auditor — and having audited institutions like the City of Johannesburg — I’ve seen this up close. Strip away the politics and personalities, and corruption becomes far less mysterious.

It follows a structure.

Corruption requires three things: opportunity, incentives and pressure. Remove those three, and the risk drops dramatically. Allow them to coexist inside an uncovered structure, and corruption becomes almost inevitable.

These conditions are not unique to South Africa. They appear wherever weak accountability meets concentrated power — from municipal systems in emerging economies to procurement failures in developed states. The difference is not whether the conditions exist, but whether they are interrupted. In systems where they are left to align, corruption stops being an exception and becomes a pattern.

The roof that is no longer there — opportunity

Start with opportunity.

In South Africa, opportunity is not hidden. It is created — sometimes by design, often by drift — inside the very systems meant to safeguard public resources.

Procurement processes that are so complex that they become opaque. Internal controls that exist on paper but not in practice. Oversight mechanisms that are fragmented and slow.

In environments like municipalities and policing structures, decision-making power is often concentrated, while accountability is diluted.

That is not inefficiency.
That is access.

Corruption does not need chaos. It needs a structure it can hide inside. A building that has lost its roof does not look broken from the street. It looks like a building. The damage announces itself only later, when the weather changes.

The maths still works — incentives

Then come incentives.

We often talk about corruption as if it is irrational — as if people wake up one day and suddenly abandon their values.

But in many cases, corruption is calculated.

If the reward is significant, the likelihood of being caught is low, and the consequences are delayed or negotiable, then the decision, while wrong, becomes predictable.

And in South Africa, too often, the maths works.

We have normalised prolonged suspensions with pay. Investigations that stretch for years. Officials resurfacing in different roles.

So the system communicates something clearly, even if unintentionally:

The upside is immediate. The downside is uncertain.

That is not a deterrent.

It is an invitation. Like an open eave on an unwatched building, it tells whoever is passing that whatever finds its way in is unlikely to be turned back out.

The upside is immediate. The downside, on present evidence, is minimal.

In any other system, that would be called a guaranteed return.

This is not a hunch

This is not a hunch. The 2024–25 Consolidated General Report on National and Provincial Audit Outcomes, tabled this April by the Auditor-General, Tsakani Maluleke, confirms a system that many of us have already seen from the inside.

R42.58-billion in irregular expenditure for the year, incurred by 60% of audited institutions, 83% of which did so the year before, too — and the year before that. Of the prior-year balance, roughly 1% has been recovered or is in the process of recovery. The rest has been condoned, written off, or quietly removed.

Of 57 institutions where fraud allegations were lodged through hotlines, 30% had not investigated a single one by year-end. The bulk of the unexamined allegations were in health and education.

The number of institutions failing to comply with consequence management legislation rose from 119 to 140 in a single year.

The Auditor-General does not soften it. She writes that the lack of accountability and consequences is “one of the primary drivers” and that “a culture of disrespecting the rule of law not only undermines public trust but also demonstrates to the public that such behaviour is tolerated”.

The pressure beneath the surface

Pressure is the quiet driver.

And this is where inequality enters the conversation — not as an excuse, but as context.

South Africa is one of the most unequal societies in the world. That reality creates a unique psychological environment: proximity to wealth without access to it, expectations to provide beyond one’s means, and social pressure to display success.

Pressure is not just about poverty. It is about comparison, obligation and identity.

In that environment, the temptation is not unusual. The decision is.

But pressure alone does not produce corruption.

Many people carry immense pressure and remain honest.

Pressure is the weather. Every building stands in it. The question is never whether the storm will come. The question is what is overhead when it does.

The part we avoid — formation

There is a deeper vulnerability we are reluctant to confront.

Formation.

We are trying to fix corruption with policies, frameworks, and commissions — all necessary — but we are overlooking the kind of people those structures are populated with.

The Auditor-General hints at this when she describes a “minimum compliance mindset” that has settled into many institutions — a “false sense of achievement” where doing the bare legal minimum is mistaken for doing the job. Seventy percent of the institutions in the unqualified-with-findings category were there last year, too. Eight percent have been there for at least a decade. That is not a procedural problem. That is a way of being at work, repeated for 10 years, by enough people for it to be the culture.

In a country grappling with widespread father absence, many enter positions of responsibility having had limited exposure to consistent, accountable authority in formative years. That is not a moral judgment — it is a structural reality. Where authority has been absent, erratic or unaccountable, the instinct is often not to steward power, but to survive within it.

So when opportunity, incentives, and pressure converge, the structure is not the only thing under strain.

The person is, too.

This is not about blame. It is about recognising a formation gap.

We are producing individuals who can access power, but have not been consistently formed to carry it.

Buildings, no matter how well designed, eventually bend to the character of the people inside them. And people, no matter how capable, eventually bend to whatever was — or was not — built into them long before they took the job.

This is not incompetence

We often reach for the language of incompetence.

It is comforting. It lowers the temperature.

But large-scale corruption is rarely the result of people not knowing what they are doing.

It is the result of people understanding the structure — and understanding that it will not stop them.

This is not dysfunction.

It is functioning exactly as the current incentives allow.

Where the state begins to slip

When corruption reaches law enforcement itself, the stakes change.

Because now the institution meant to enforce accountability is entangled in its absence.

And when that happens, something deeper begins to erode: trust.

Citizens start to withdraw from formal systems. Private solutions replace public ones. Order becomes fragmented.

You can see it already: gated communities, a private security industry expanding, informal systems of protection emerging.

These are not just lifestyle choices. They are signals. Citizens have looked up, seen sky where covering should have been, and started building their own shelters.

What actually needs to change

If corruption requires opportunity, incentives and pressure, then the response is not vague. It is surgical.

Close the opportunity. Simplify and digitise procurement. Strengthen real-time transparency. Empower truly independent internal audit functions.

Reverse the incentives. Swift, visible consequences. No prolonged suspensions with pay. Personal accountability that cannot be outsourced. The Auditor-General is already saying this in formal language; the question is whether anyone with the power to act on it will.

Address the pressure — without excusing misbehaviour. Confront inequality structurally. Reshape cultural expectations around success and provision.

And then, the hardest work: rebuild formation. Raise leaders, not just operators. Restore models of accountable authority. Cultivate internal restraint, not just external compliance.

That last one is the roof. Without it, every other reform stands exposed.

Final thought

We don’t have a corruption problem because we don’t understand corruption. We have a corruption problem because we have allowed the conditions for it to thrive.

Opportunity. Incentives. Pressure. Aligned inside structures whose covering has gone missing.

My father had to move because of polygamy; my brother by the same forces, in his own season. Years later, my own struggles forced me to move from a home where my wife and daughter needed me. The pattern was not the building. The pattern was the moving — generation after generation, the person who was supposed to be the covering displaced by something the family did not see coming, and the children left waiting.

Some of our institutions were not created without roofs. The covering was removed — by State Capture, by patronage, by the slow erosion of the unwritten code that used to make accountability feel like home rather than a threat. Other institutions were compromised from the start; structures with no covering.

The result, in both cases, is the same. Each displacement was an event we noticed at the time and then stopped noticing. The walls held. The lights stayed on. And the people inside kept waiting for a covering.

A structure without a covering will not collapse all at once. It will hold, and hold, and hold — until one ordinary day, it doesn’t.

We are not short of institutions.
We are not short of policies.
We are not even short of outrage.

What we are short of is covering.

And until that is restored — in our systems, in our leadership, and in the formation of the people who hold both — the structure will keep holding just long enough to fool us.

Until, one ordinary day, it doesn’t. DM