By Glenn Hollands

Special investigators swapped stories with NGO researchers and municipal auditors compared notes with former Scorpions detectives. This unusual gathering was occasioned by the Local Governance and Corruption conference held in November 2006 and hosted by Afesis-corplan and Mbumba Development Services. Given the governance problems of the region, East London imparted a strong sense of reality for the South African leg of this global initiative that will seek to better understand corruption in local government with special reference to its impact on infrastructure services. The conference was a further step emerging from a hands-on workshop entitled Combating Corruption in the Delivery of Infrastructure Services initiated  by Loughborough University and co-organised with the Commonwealth Secretariat in the United Kingdom.  Action orientated rather than a talk shop or think tank, the workshop covered topics relating to government work with the private sector, public integrity reform, whistle blowing, and anti-corruption programme design. The participants drawn from business, government and NGOs in 15 Commonwealth countries in Asia, Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean are seeking to better coordinate both state and civil society initiatives that will produce effective tools to “end the misuse of power for private gain”.

“This first step represents an enormous change in the way that large construction and servicing projects in the infrastructure sector will be handled”, said Dr Sohail, the organiser of the initiative and a senior research manager at Water, Engineering and Development Centre (WEDC) based at Loughborough University.

The East London conference was a rare opportunity for agencies like the Special Investigations Unit and the Scorpions to interact with NGOs and other research institutions in the presence of municipal auditors who are at the frontline when it comes to instituting anti-corruption safeguards. Gerhard Visagie Head of SIU investigations noted that about US$40 billion is lost per annum to procurement / tender corruption around the world. The importance of a joint will to combat corruption was illustrated by the example of the SIU model for launching investigations. Government departments actually contract the SIU to do investigations into their own affairs and pay for the service. According to Visagie, SIU interventions had resulted in cash recovery of R79 million and the prevention of future losses in the amount of R6, 7 billion between 2001/2002 – 2005/2006.

Some of the most important projects were:

• Removal of non-entitled beneficiaries from the Department of Social Development’s social grant database and prosecution of those who have defrauded the system. The SIU had identified 43 705 civil servants on the social pension system of which only 22 117 were entitled to social grants. The resulting cancellation of pensions had been valued at R51 million involving government officials of whom 15 982 have been removed from the social pensions system.
• The SIU is also involved in smaller “projects” like the R6 million anti-corruption partnership with the Department of Local Government in the Eastern Cape and has 17 staff members dedicated to this project.

Explaining that the SIU sought to protect and recover state assets rather than act in a punitive manner, Advocate Visagie outlined the unusual Acknowledgment of Debt (AOD) mechanism. The AOD is signed by public servants who are willing and able to pay back irregularly acquired state funds over a period that averages 33 months. This is not regarded as a “settlement” and it does not preclude prosecution but 4 319 public servants have signed such agreements to the value of R24, 7 million. Andile Sokomani of the Institute of Security Studies endorsed the value of such strategies but suggested that the recovery of illegal social grants through debt-orders takes the profit out of corruption rather than punishing it and the actual recovery process is slow and cumbersome.

Daniel Molokele, a board member of Transparency South Africa, suggested that over the past decade corruption has increasingly become a topical issue in the South African national discourse and indeed a matter of keen international interest stimulated by a series of high profile corruption cases including that of scandals related to Tony Yengeni, Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, Armsgate, Travelgate, the Oil gate scandal, the murder of Brett Kebble and perhaps most significantly the charges of a corrupt relationship between Shabir Shaik and Deputy President Jacob Zuma. Public confidence in the South African Police Service’s capacity to investigate these and other cases properly has been badly eroded by allegations that the National Police Commissioner is linked to organised crime. These problems must be seen against the backdrop of the South African government’s firm commitment to fight corruption. The government, for example, played a role in drafting the United Nations Convention against Corruption and was one of 15 countries to ratify the convention. The government has also organised a series of national anti-corruption summits that have resulted in the creation of various multi-stakeholder forums against corruption. The sustainability of these is, however, questionable. Molokele cited the example of the National Anti-Corruption Forum, a tripartite body consisting of civil society, government and business that have tried to develop a broader national response to corruption. Molokele noted that although such structures give SA an exemplary anti-corruption response, they are of questionable effectiveness and there are not coherent relations between the various member bodies.

Focusing on corruption in local government and particularly that related to infrastructure projects, Glenn Hollands of Mbumba Development Services outlined the importance in monetary terms of municipal service and infrastructure delivery. Total national transfers rose from R12 billion in 2003/2004 to R17,1 billion in 2006/2007. Hollands cited several examples of large infrastructure project where the tender process had been blatantly defrauded. He went on to warn, however, that inflated salary bills and escalating “non-productive” institutional costs probably posed an even more important form of corruption if this term was understood in its broader sense. Outlining case studies in the Eastern Cape, Hollands suggested that commitments to realign spending priorities in integrated development plans were often fraudulent as municipalities continued to increase institutional and staffing costs and spend less and less on maintenance and repairs. “Corruption in South African local government is systemic and rooted in emerging political culture, policy and systems rather than arbitrary acts of fraud and graft.”

Peter Kimemia of Afesis-corplan outlined an NGO instrument known as the Good Governance Survey noting that this was becoming an increasingly credible tool for measuring and promoting transparency and accountability in municipal government. Kimemia noted that the GGS provided an early warning system that could pre-empt further deterioration in local accountability. Provisional findings from the 2006 round of surveys suggested that lack of understanding of rights and responsibilities on the part of communities and CBOs usually contributes towards corruption. Nepotism is one of the most serious problems; “only connected people get jobs in local government” and the public do not know who to report corruption to and fear the consequences of reporting i.e. reprisal, “….while there might be an investigation, they see little prospect of effective action like dismissal.”

Lorraine Stober of the Open Democracy Advice Centre discussed the value of whistle blowing as a corporate governance tool to improve accountability. She noted that whistleblowers suffered from an unfortunate historical association with informers or “impimpis” and that possible whistleblowers faced some hard choices and the strong possibility of victimisation when coming forward. The Protected Disclosures Act had provided limited protection for employees who acted as whistleblowers but only if they carefully followed the prescribed procedure for “blowing the whistle”.

In the final plenary discussion, strategies and partnerships for combating corruption were explored. Participants brainstormed ideas on how their different organisational expertise could combine to contribute in the fight against corruption. In short, the proposed interventions included training/capacity building of municipal officials; research and profiling of high risk people and systems; awards and incentives to encourage ethical behaviour; producing assessment tools and a corruption perception index for local government; and civic education to empower the community to play a role in monitoring.

Local Government Transformer Vol 13 No.1 Feb/Mar 2007