A cycle of diminishing expectations
South Africans are learning the hard way that corruption cannot simply be solved through technical fixes and increasing “accountability” through locking the villains up.
In June 2019, Judge Raymond Zondo, who currently leads a public commission into state corruption in South Africa, swears in Deputy President David Mabuza, himself suspected of corruption, as the country’s acting president. Image via GCIS on Flickr CC.
South Africa is finally cracking down on corrupt politicians after years of inertia amid weekly revelations about the depravity and scale of corruption through the Zondo Commission (led by the country’s current deputy chief judge) into “state capture” during former President Jacob Zuma’s tenure (2009-2018). “State capture” refers to the handing over of the levers of the economy and policymaking to private interests, in this case the Guptas, a powerful Indian business clan.
Fighting enemies in his own party, President Cyril Ramaphosa is trying to portray recent arrests of political figures, alleged to have profited from state capture, as a win for his stuttering government. But arrests alone do not offer a way forward for South Africa, given the scale of the economic and political crisis the country is facing. The South African government is set on implementing and selling in the name of anticorruption a plan of harsh austerity that will escalate an already brewing social crisis. The country urgently needs more than arrests if the problem of corruption is going to be seriously addressed.
