CAPE TOWN - Climate action and the resurgent Covid-19 variant, Omicron, may be the defining challenges confronting humanity potentially for years to come.
Judging by Transparency International’s just-released Corruption Perception Index (CPI) 2021, an equally entrenched blight that continues to affect the world is corruption. And the signs are that it is getting worse.
Love it or hate it, the CPI has become the moral compass of the annual state of integrity in global governance and public affairs. Corruption’s political and socio-economic impacts are so pervasive that it directly affects the daily lives of millions of ordinary citizens through diversion of scarce resources thus undermining delivery of essential services primarily through non-transparency, state capture, cronyism and public procurement profiteering involving the private sector.
CPI 2021, which scored and ranked 180 countries on their perceived levels of public sector corruption, according to experts and business people, on a scale where 100 is very clean and 0 is highly corrupt, reveals that “a shocking 86% of countries have made no significant progress in the past decade. The CPI average score has remained at 43 out of 100 for the past decade. It’s high time governments around the world address corruption at the highest levels and ensure that no one can get away with abuses of power”.
The usual suspects of the top 10 least corrupt and top 20 most corrupt countries have remained static for the past few years, with Denmark, Finland and New Zealand the cleanest countries with a score of 88 each and South Sudan tarnished as the most corrupt country in the world with a CPI score of 11, followed by Syria and Somalia at 13, Venezuela at 14, and Yemen, North Korea and Afghanistan at 16.
Of the top 20 most corrupt countries, 12 are from Africa, of which 10 are in conflict or a state of civil war.
Despite President Ramaphosa’s stated commitment to tackle corruption, South Africa’s CPI score has failed to buck the trend, stagnating at 44 with Tunisia and Jamaica for the past few years.
Why does corruption continue to be so entrenched?
A lack of democratic checks and balances; poor governance; conflict and civil war are the usual causes cited. Calling out corrupt practices and effective monitoring are meaningless without the requisite national and international sanctions.
Corruption is driven by greed and money. If perpetrators know they can get away with parking their ill-gotten gains in financial markets all over including Delaware in the US and London, as several Russian oligarchs have done for narrow economic self-interest, the phenomenon will continue.
CPI 2021 shows that despite commitments on paper, a staggering 131 countries have made no significant progress against corruption over the past decade and this year, 27 countries are at historic lows in their CPI score.
If the credibility of the very global anti-money laundering mechanisms is at stake, then what hope for any progress in rooting out corruption?
Consider beneficial ownership of anonymous shell companies. The US Congress only passed a law banning it last year. In Africa most governments agree that such companies enable illicit financial flows, with detrimental consequences to their economies.
In tandem with the CPI 2021 release, Transparency International, joined by partners from across Africa wrote an open letter to the Financial Action Task Force (FATF), urging it to ensure that the revised global standard requires transparent, centralised, public registers of beneficial ownership – everywhere.
“Ghana, Kenya, Senegal, Uganda, Nigeria, South Africa, Togo and Zambia,” they noted, “have all made demonstrable advancements on their commitments through the Open Government Partnership and the Extractives Industry Transparency Initiative.
“However, the ever-increasing volume of illicit financial outflows from Africa and the growing inequality in most African countries highlight that the progress is too slow and uneven. The absence of legal frameworks to clearly define beneficial ownership, the lack of availability of registries that collect information on both legal entities and trusts and the lack of public access to these registers are serious impediments”.
South Africans are under no illusion about corruption. They are on the receiving end daily of failed service deliveries, rising prices and politicians and their cronies enriching themselves. Ramaphosa’s New Year’s message to the nation predictably aspired to “build on the progress that has been made in ending state capture and fighting corruption. We will continue to prevent corruption and successfully prosecute those responsible for malfeasance”.
Corruption has been a feature of ANC governments since 2009, if not earlier. Ramaphosa will be preoccupied with dealing with it well beyond the first quarter of 2022 as the Zondo Commission drip-feeds parts of its Judicial Commission of Inquiry into Allegations of State Capture. Part one has already been dispatched. Last week he also released the final report of the SIU investigation into government pandemic procurement.
The findings confirm how entrenched corruption is. The SIU investigated 5 467 contracts awarded to 3 066 service providers, with a total value of R14.3bn. Investigations have been finalised with respect to 4 549 contracts of which 2 803 were found to be irregular.
“It is unacceptable,” rued the president, “that so many contracts associated with saving lives and protecting livelihoods were irregular, unlawful or fraudulent. This investigation demonstrates our determination to root out corruption and to deal with the perpetrators.”
Sub-Saharan Africa once again is bearing the brunt – at 33, it’s the lowest- scoring region in the CPI detracting from its good news stories. At 70, Seychelles is the highest scoring AU country, followed by Botswana at 55. But even in high- scoring countries, public sector corruption may take less flagrant forms, and are far from being corruption-free.
It is no coincidence that corruption stalks a decline in democracy and abuses of human rights. The result is that authoritarianism takes its place, contributing to even higher levels of corruption.
CPI 2021 strongly demonstrates that the fight against corruption cannot be entrusted to political leaders alone. It requires the active participation of all stakeholders.
Parker is an economist and writer based in London
Cape Times