THE ONLY WAY TO END CORRUPTION:

Cut the corrupt off from their feeding channels

● The first report of the Zondo commission does more than identify culprits for criminal prosecution. It goes a long way in confirming, and providing further detail about what was argued in the 2017 “Betrayal of the Promise” report published by the State Capacity Research Group. It also lays out an ambitious project of government reform.

Part 1 of the Zondo report shows how corruption in SA is the result of incestuous relationships between political, administrative and economic powers in the management of the state apparatus. While the report resembles the verdict in a criminal case in the way it marshals evidence of crimes and names those responsible, the recommendations also offer an anticorruption agenda with comprehensive and ambitious proposals.

Notwithstanding the evidence of the crimes, the policy recommendations must be subject to public scrutiny and debate.

They can be organised into three groups: the trial and conviction of individuals responsible for wrongdoing; improvements in the political system, such as changes in the financing of political parties; and addressing weaknesses of the public procurement system, correctly identified as being at the heart of so much corruption and government failure.

Here we would like to consider the commission’s proposals regarding public procurement. We understand that what has been published so far may be supplemented in the final report with further detail. There is, nonetheless, a substantive proposal from Zondo in part 1 of the report.

While SA’s political culture is such that questions of administration are usually treated with a yawn, buying goods and services constitutes a large part of what the government does. In fact 14% of the national budget was spent on goods and services in 2021 — more than the cost of public debt. Even a modest improvement in this area could have transformational effects in our lives. There are many examples, but two will suffice.

Farmers, workers and residents in the Tzaneen area have recently been harassed by hippos that have moved into farm dams. Why? The infamous Edwin Sodi, hired to upgrade the municipal dam where the hippos were in residence, made a mess of things and the water level dropped. The hippos moved out.

As the pandemic spread and hospitalisations and deaths spiralled, the government relaxed regulations for the procurement of protective gear. An emergency necessitated emergency procurement. Yet the result, as the auditor-general reported, was a grotesque frenzy of price gouging, fraud and general manipulation of process. In this case, supply chain management was a matter of life and death.

Public procurement is about the everyday functioning of government. This is why it is so important that the system is reformed. How should this be done?

The state capture commission has recommended that a new anti-corruption agency be created to deal specifically with public procurement. It would increase transparency in public tenders, see to the formation of a body of professionals specialised in public procurement, and introduce new codes of conduct to strengthen integrity management among public servants. These proposals, however, are insufficient and would still fall short in closing the loopholes that allow manipulation and looting.

In public enterprises, especially those implicated in state capture but across the government, procurement has come to a standstill, and with it the work of the government. In this environment even decent people are often too scared to make decisions at all. Procurement reform must not just reduce the risk of corruption from happening; it must also make procurement possible, easy and effective.

SA needs a professional and effective public service whose operational excellence is the main source of corruption prevention. This will not be achieved by reforming the public procurement system alone, much less by creating a new anti-corruption agency.

The public procurement system is already overly fragmented and regulated by legal regimes. The introduction of a new agency with the exclusive mission of combating corruption will be yet another arrangement to further complicate the procurement system and anti-corruption system. Both are handicapped by the lack of strategic co-ordination, of human and financial resources, of capacity to conduct sophisticated analysis and of institutional support.

Better than a new agency, it would be useful to strengthen the regulatory function exercised by the office of the chief procurement officer, making it an autonomous agency responsible for giving directives and implementing guidelines for public procurement throughout the country.

A supply chain manager should be a prized position, attracting highly skilled and senior candidates who are appropriately rewarded. After all, these officials must be able to tell the difference between a scam and an innovation, write specifications and evaluate the technical standards of bids. In banks these are highly paid roles. In the government these tasks are left to junior officials for whom the job is a career dead-end.

It is the extreme shortage of people with technical knowledge of products and services that means certain actions must be centralised, or at least regionalised. As a thought experiment, imagine that you are an official in the department of transport who has to write the specifications for hiring security guards. How many guards do you need, what qualifications should they have, how should they be resourced? None are simple questions in fact. Get the answers wrong and you end up without train stations.

A centralising approach also presents risks, of course — institutions with generic mandates are more attractive prey to abuse of power and traditional cases of dismantling the public service. This is why it is crucial to reform the process by which heads of institutions are selected and managed. For the civil service to live, cadre deployment must die. This is why we suggested in a report last year the introduction of a senior civil service system such as that adopted by the US, UK, Australia, Chile and Portugal.

The Zondo commission has correctly put its finger on public procurement as urgently needing reform. The system is the lifeblood of the government. It is the lifeblood of SA’s shadow state, too — the nexus where business and politics feed off each other. The commission’s proposal has put public procurement firmly on the agenda but needs further consideration for stronger safeguards. We must seize the moment — not least for the sake of the hippos.