Building a Culture of Accountability - a Call to Action
South Africa’s ethics infrastructure, while impressive on paper, is marred by significant implementation challenges such as poor compliance, uneven application, and little follow-through in terms of investigations and prosecutions. This speaks volumes about the lack of commitment of politicians and officials to meeting their public duties and obligations.
Collette Schulz Herzenberg, senior researcher, Corruption and Governance Programme, Institute for Security Studies, Cape Town.
South Africa’s ethics infrastructure, while impressive on paper, is marred by significant implementation challenges such as poor compliance, uneven application, and little follow-through in terms of investigations and prosecutions. This speaks volumes about the lack of commitment of politicians and officials to meeting their public duties and obligations.
It also highlights the inherent weaknesses in these integrity systems and raises serious questions about the dedication of senior officials tasked with oversight and implementation of ethics rules. How is it possible that the same serial offenders in government who fail to declare their financial interests go unpunished year after year?
Enforcement and penalties are key elements of a functioning ethics framework. When senior officials do not enforce rules or sanction unethical conduct of their fellow employees it suggests that they are entirely unaware of the serious consequences for the wider body politic. Citizens expect public officials to serve the public interest with fairness and to manage public resources properly. If citizens believe that their elected officials do not act for the public good, or that they misuse their office to benefit themselves or others close to them, then public trust, vital to the well-being of democratic institutions, is eroded.
When inaction results in mistrust government loses its credibility and authority to implement policies, demand societal compliance to laws, and govern effectively. Citizens respond with cynicism, and as is increasingly the case, passionate protests, as public perceptions over government’s failure to deliver fairly and efficiently rise. After all, public opinion is the ultimate arbiter of poor governance. And since citizens bear the brunt of corruption, as corrupt private interests divert state resources away from services, it is they who will ultimately decide what is acceptable behavior from public officials.
In a manner reminiscent of the struggle against apartheid, the immediate challenge is to leverage the public’s aversion to corruption. By finding creative ways to harness the weight of public opinion in an organized and effective manner civil society, the media and state institutions can help generate a common call for action.
A recent conference on ethics in public life, organised by the Institute for Security Studies Corruption & Governance Programme and the Public Service Commission, indicates that South Africans are a nation of maturing democrats. Government, civil society, academics and the media grasped the opportunity to debate tough and complex issues concerning ethical conduct in public life. The nuts and bolts of a system of integrity that can help untangle the conflation of private business and party political interests that have come to dominate the way decisions are made by politicians and civil servants. The consequence of inaction is the current tendency of corruption and poor service delivery South Africa experiences today.
Engagements were robust and honest and reflected the extent to which we have jointly moved towards a greater cross-sectoral consensus that conflicts of interest and corruption in South Africa are increasingly urgent areas for reform. In marked contrast to similar engagements of the past where emphasis was on the remedies of imminent legislative frameworks to control corruption and unethical behavior, discussion grappled with problematic laws, loopholes and innovative reform solutions, and thus raised new challenges.
Most encouraging is a growing recognition that certain unregulated activities in public life generate serious conflicts of interest situations. And if left unabated, they will continue to contribute to the corruption scourge in South Africa. These include the private funding of political parties, public tendering and procurement, and the movement of people, or ‘revolving door’, between government and the business. A myriad of difficult questions present themselves. Should companies owned by political parties be awarded large state contracts and tenders? It surely gives some parties an unfair advantage over others when they are able to raise their funds by accessing the state’s purse? Similarly, should government officials or political party leaders, or their relatives, be allowed to participate in the bidding for public tenders? Their proximity to the deal and insider knowledge of the process once again extends unfair benefits of public office.
In other words, we can no longer afford to narrow our discussion to the existing regulatory framework – we need to cast our sights far wider. Public life lends itself to many ethical dilemmas - many of which remain under-regulated, or simply unregulated, in South Africa. A conflict of interest is a contextual situation and is not simply an action of a public official. And there are still many instances where the private conduct of public figures and organizations generate dubious conflict of interest situations.
With multiple sources for conflicts of interest, and many unregulated, what measures should be considered by policy makers to improve integrity in public life? And how can we better strengthen existing measures? Perhaps we should also take this opportunity to give serious consideration to the merits of a wide range of new policy proposals that have been placed in the public domain in recent years. These include, among others, the introduction of an Integrity Commissioner, lifestyle audits and the extension of disclosure regulations to middle managers in the public sector.
What can we do? The following are recommendations on policy and institutional reform:
- Standardize codes of conduct for all elected representative and public officials
- Financial disclosure regulations – scrap the confidential section of the register, which includes spouses.
- Introduce an Integrity Commissioner with genuine investigative powers to detect and control conflicts of interests in politicians’ conduct and the disclosure of their private financial interests
- Radically increase access to information in government
- Stop the current version of the Protection of Information (Secrecy) Bill
- Enforce the protection of whistle blowers
- Introduce post employment restrictions to curb the revolving door between government and the private sector
- Introduce lifestyle audits of public officials
- Introduce the Bid Protest system as a quick, affordable and effective method for aggrieved bidders to highlight irregularities in public tendering and procurement
- Use the defunct Tender Defaulters Register
- Regulate the flow of private, secret funds to political parties
- Centralize information on conflicts of interest and corruption to ensure detection becomes easier
- Encourage greater scrutiny of available information by media and civil society
Finally, a crucial theme that has emerged in the ethics debate is the need to internalise the value system that underpins South Africa’s ethics infrastructure. Despite the rules, at times we appear to lack the values that strive for integrity in public life. Compliance to rules is necessary, but is insufficient for an efficient and meaningful integrity system. Public officials should also want to comply. This requires a transition from a rules-based society to one based on values, in which people are committed to ethical principles, as both an end in itself and a means for realizing social justice.
The shift will involve a fundamental acceptance of the basic tenets of ethical governance by all actors - that of accountability, transparency and openness in the actions public office bearers. And it will require all senior public officials to lead by example. Common values can also help bond a diverse society and to consolidate a young democracy. And when uncertainty sets in about the values we should adopt as a nation our recourse can be found within the founding principles of our Constitution.
