What South Africa can learn from Hong Kong’s war on police corruption

In 1973, a senior Hong Kong police officer packed his “tea” money and ran. And not metaphorically. Peter Godber, a chief superintendent in a police force already famous for its corruption, slipped out of the city while under investigation for wealth no honest salary could explain.

His escape did what years of rumours, complaints and quiet public anger had failed to do. It turned corruption from background noise into a civic humiliation.

A city that had learnt to pay “tea money” for basic services suddenly saw the reality clearly. Their police were not just failing to stop corruption. Too often, they were the corruption.

It is a story from across the globe, half a century ago, but it does not feel foreign.

Today, we think of Hong Kong as a city of improbable efficiency with glass skyscrapers, frictionless public transport and a beacon of order in the East. But half a century ago, it was a different city where corruption was not an exception to the system. It was the system.

Just like South Africans know what “cooldrink money” actually means, Hongkongers paid “tea money” for public services, petty bribes for small mercies, larger payments for larger favours. The police, in particular, had become completely compromised.

The response to the national embarrassment of Godber’s escape was definitive.

Hong Kong created the Independent Commission Against Corruption, the ICAC, in 1974. Its founding insight was simple: The police could not credibly investigate the police. Anti-corruption work had to be moved outside the institution most associated with the disease.

That is the first lesson for South Africa.

We often speak about police corruption as though it were a disciplinary problem. It is not. It is a state-capacity problem, a public-trust problem and, in many communities, a life-and-death problem. In a South Africa where dockets disappear, witnesses are exposed and assassinated in broad daylight, and the wheels of justice don’t turn at all, corruption is no longer a white-collar inconvenience. It actually drives and funds violence.

Hong Kong’s success

Hong Kong’s genius was not that it created a powerful agency. Many countries create powerful agencies. The genius was that it understood corruption as an ecosystem. The ICAC had three arms: investigation, prevention and public education.

The first arm was the dramatic one. Newly empowered investigators, deliberately placed outside the police service, arrested officials, followed the money, examined bank accounts and pursued unexplained wealth. For decades, everyone had known about the obvious corruption, but nothing changed. The ICAC changed the psychology of the system. It delivered through arrests, prosecutions and the visible collapse of impunity.

The second arm may have been just as important. The ICAC did not only ask who took the bribe. It asked why the bribe was possible. Which approval required too much discretion? Which process had too little oversight? Which licensing system created a bottleneck?

This matters profoundly for South Africa. We love the theatre of arrests. Blue lights, cameras, stern faces, a press briefing. But corruption is not defeated by spectacle alone. It is defeated when the opportunity to be corrupt is designed out of the system.

The third arm was public education. This can sound soft and almost decorative, as if it were just posters and school talks. In Hong Kong, it was serious. The public had to be persuaded that corruption was no longer normal. People had to know where to report it, believe they would be protected, and see enough successful cases to trust the new order.

South Africa needs a new social bargain. A constable in a small town must believe that reporting a corrupt superior will not end his or her career. A shopkeeper in a neighbourhood controlled by extortionists must believe that his tip-off will not be leaked. A mother in a gang-controlled community must know that dockets will not disappear.

Our own version of ICAC

Our own history, especially after State Capture, demands stronger constitutional and parliamentary safeguards. A South African anti-corruption institution must not be dependent on the goodwill of the very political system it may one day need to investigate. It needs protected funding, transparent appointments, security of tenure, judicial oversight and reporting lines that make it difficult for any minister, commissioner or president to quietly starve it into obedience.

The Constitutional Court’s Glenister judgment established that South Africa is required to maintain a sufficiently independent anti-corruption capacity. The question is whether we are willing to take that principle seriously when the corruption being investigated sits inside the police itself.

A South African version of Hong Kong’s lesson would therefore not be a crude copy of the ICAC. It would be something rooted in our own constitutional soil. A genuinely independent anti-corruption architecture outside SAPS, connected to a strengthened prosecutorial capacity, with a specialised police-corruption mandate, real investigative powers and a mandate to change the complexity of laws and regulations that allow corruption in the first place.

It would also require political courage of a kind South Africa has too often faked. Hong Kong’s reform worked because the state admitted that the existing system could not fix itself. South Africa must make the same admission. SAPS cannot fix SAPS corruption.

Enough of impunity

There is one Hong Kong lesson we should decisively reject. In 1977, facing serious police resistance, Hong Kong granted a limited amnesty for certain past offences. Whatever its tactical value there, South Africa should be wary of any grand bargain that excuses the corrupt. We have had enough of impunity.

Hong Kong’s actual story is that it built a system in which honesty became easier and corruption became riskier. That is what South Africa needs.

Has South Africa reached its Godber moment? Perhaps the better question is whether we will recognise it before the next bag of “cooldrink” money is already out the door. DM