CAPE TOWN, South Africa (AP) – There is some hope in South Africa that this time, outrage against corruption will inspire effective action.
Public outrage over the government’s suspicious contracts worth almost $ 900 million to purchase supplies to combat COVID-19 could finally prompt the South African government to take more decisive action against corruption, experts say.
Africa’s most developed economy is already deeply mired in corruption with a commission of inquiry that heard allegations of widespread corruption during the term of former President Jacob Zuma. The new accusations of misuse of public money aimed at combating the pandemic COVID-19 have the potential to be a turning point, experts say.
In a report last month, the government’s Special Investigation Unit described how the purchase of personal protective equipment for hospitals and clinics and other supplies in the first months of the pandemic last year was abused by local, provincial and national officials.
As South African virus cases multiplied rapidly, making it the most affected country in Africa, these officials were signing more than 2,500 emergency contracts that were identified for investigating corruption and mismanagement. More charges are still coming, investigators say, and their investigation is ongoing.
Part of the alleged corruption was large and complex, involving shell companies moving millions of dollars through a network of bank accounts.
Other schemes were shamefully simple, like charging extra for blankets to be given to the poor in early winter. One, a $ 670,000 order to buy motorcycles with side cars to use as ambulances for patients with COVID-19, was simply absurd.
There was “a complete collapse of checks and balances,” the unit said.
Some cases were referred to the Public Prosecutor’s Office for criminal prosecution. The investigative unit is investigating transactions involving more than 30% of all the money the South African government has spent on combating COVID-19 through November, he said.
It would be shocking, say corruption experts, if corruption was not already deeply ingrained in South Africa.
“I get the outrage, but not the surprise,” said David Lewis, executive director of Corruption Watch in South Africa. “We have been fighting corruption on a large scale ever since.”
For nearly three years, the state corruption commission of inquiry over the years Zuma aired dirty details of how heads of state-owned companies, senior law officials, ministers and Zuma himself were supposedly on the payroll of companies almost daily. corrupt to allow them to profit from huge government contracts. Zuma was president from 2009 until 2018, when he was forced to leave due to widespread corruption charges.
President Cyril Ramaphosa came to power promising to eradicate our corruption. But many officials of the ruling party, the African National Congress, continued with the graft and saw the pandemic as an opportunity. Ramaphosa is facing resistance from within the ANC – the party that Nelson Mandela led – as Zuma challenged court orders to testify at the corruption hearing and the party’s secretary general refused to resign while he faces criminal charges for corruption. Many see this as a sign that, despite Ramaphosa’s good intentions, the party is not willing to reform.
Despite the exasperation of the South Africans, William Gumede, founder of the reflection group Democracy Works, strongly believes that this is a turning point. He was part of a panel of experts who wrote a report to the government calling for strong action when corruption in the midst of the pandemic first emerged.
Gumede said this scandal “is so difficult for the ANC to give up” because it was particularly “disgusting” during a health crisis and was not under Zuma’s contaminated administration. Zuma left, but the corruption continues, he said.
Gumede also identified a change in national sentiment since the coronavirus. The pandemic led South Africa, with 1.5 million cases and more than 50,000 deaths, to perhaps its lowest point since the end of apartheid in 1994. South Africa was in a recession even before the devastating effects of the virus. Unemployment has now risen to over 30% and, in a dire warning for the future, youth unemployment is almost 60%.
“Now they have been directly affected,” said Gumede of South Africans, who often did not see high-cost corruption as something that affected them personally. “You are sitting at home because your factory has just closed. You can’t turn your back on him anymore. This is what has changed. “
But Gumede and Lewis agreed that this is not just a high-level graft. The corruption that most directly affects everyday South Africans flares up at local levels.
Trust in government is at an all-time low, according to Sekoetlane Phamodi, South Africa director of the Responsibility Laboratory, a group that operates in nine countries and presses for more government responsibility.
Phamodi and some young South African anti-corruption activists described what they see at grassroots levels: a school building that is collapsing because someone took a shortcut to the construction contract and pocketed extra money; a low-staff hospital that dismisses patients after the budgeted money to employ doctors and nurses disappears; unemployed forgotten by precious jobs because they cannot or do not want to pay bribes to local politicians.
This low-level corruption remains largely unchallenged, despite special investigations by South Africa and national commissions, they say.
“Theoretically, times are changing,” said one of the young activists, Shepherd Siyanda Masondo. “In fact, they are not.”