Lowering bar on corruption

There was a time when transparency was the buzzword in defining the standards of South Africa’s new government which Nelson Mandela led in 1994.

The main reason for transparency to be placed so high on the country’s priority list was because SA’s history had shown that where decisions are taken behind closed doors in smoke-filled rooms, corruption is inevitable. And the best way to counter corruption was to do everything with everyone watching so that there would be no dark corners in which corrupt individuals could do their dirty work.

The soap opera playing itself out in the handling of the recently fired Gauteng MEC for health, Dr Bandile Masuku, shows how low the bar has been dropped over the years. There has been a seismic shift from the transparency as envisaged by Mandela and his government to the low of “if you cannot prove that I stole government funds, then I’m innocent”.

The transparency meant to create public trust in government processes has been replaced by officials trying to hide in plain sight, while doing business with government in contravention of their own rules on ethics. Masuku protests that the Special Investigation Unit (SIU) report on the Gauteng PPE scandal is like a “smoking gun in a movie full of mirrors” and the SIU might have political motives in the way it has handled the scandal.

This might well be true, but Masuku needs to take a step back and reflect on what happened under his watch in the Gauteng department. The facts are simple: a company of which his wife was a director made it onto the list of possible suppliers of personal protective equipment (PPE) to the department of which he was the political head.

The MEC correctly points out that he acted proactively as far back as April, when he sensed there could be a whiff of corruption in the department. He asked an executive employee to conduct an audit of the PPE tender process and he commissioned a law firm to look into the process. The law firm then contracted forensic investigator Paul O’Sullivan to do a forensic edit into the process. Both of the initiatives cleared the MEC of any corruption. O’Sullivan went as far as saying he “could not find a shred of evidence” implicating Masuku or his wife in corruption on PPE tenders.

The MEC might be right in alleging possible political motives in the SIU report because anything is possible in the highly fragment organisation that deployed him to his position. But he is taking the public for fools by thinking that they must pit the results of investigations by structures or people appointed by him against one that was produced by a state institution mandated to investigate such matters.

Transparency is not appointing structures to investigate your own department and it is also not asking the public to trust that he didn’t know that his wife’s company ended up on a list that was sent to him via e-mail (even though he says he never opened the attachment).

Masuku, his wife and Khuselo Diko (and her husband) have not received billions of state money similar to those that are appearing at the Zondo inquiry, but someone in their circle of friends tried. And got caught.

The bar on corruption was lowered from the lofty transparency envisaged by Mandela to the murky waters of state capture looting and the PPE scandals, without serious consequences to those involved. Lifting the standards back up will mean punishing those not exercising the required oversight to stop the corruption.

Sydney Majoko.

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