“SA is at a crossroads when it comes to corruption,” says Prof Philip Nichols, the pre-eminent expert on corruption globally. “Fifty years from now, the Zondo commission will either have been this immensely important pivotal point [in reversing corruption], or it will be just a footnote that few people know about. I hope it’s an inflection point.”
Nichols, a professor of legal studies and business ethics at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business, was in SA last week as a guest of Gideon Pogrund’s centre for business ethics at the Gordon Institute of Business Science, meeting with executives and civil society leaders.
For his sins, Nichols had already slogged through more than 4,000 pages of the 5,500 pages of the Zondo report. And during his visit, he met many of the people who have had a front-row seat to the most audacious acts of deception over the past decade — including Prof Itumeleng Mosala, who was the secretary of the Zondo commission; SAA’s executive chair John Lamola; auditor-general Tsakani Maluleke; KPMG chair Wiseman Nkuhlu; and Steinhoff CEO Louis du Preez.
Many wanted to know how SA’s Olympian corruption levels compared with the 110 other countries he’d visited.
Plenty other countries had been in the same position, Nichols told them, and some — such as Singapore or Hong Kong in the 1970s — managed to turn the tide. “The world is littered with success stories of places that were worse — a lot worse — and are now clean,” he said.
Still, some of the more cynical people he met found it hard to sound optimistic. One, for example, suggested that rather like an alcoholic taking the first step to recovery, SA should declare itself a “corrupt country”.
But speaking to the FM, Nichols says he doesn’t believe the country has lost this war. The creation of the Zondo commission, and the fact that such institutions as the judiciary and the media remain strong, show things aren’t hopeless.
“The country is at the point where everything can happen, or nothing can happen,” he says. It depends on how complacent SA is in acting on corruption, how it solves the capacity problems in law enforcement and government, and whether business is able to act collectively to combat it.
Many of those he met had practical ideas about how to do this.
When issues like Steinhoff happen, it is important for business to clamour for, and to support, accountability
— Nicky Newton-King
Nicky Newton-King, the former CEO of the JSE, said at one of the meetings with Nichols that business needs to grasp that it only operated by virtue of a social licence, which is just as important as its legal licence.
“When issues like Steinhoff happen, it is important for business to clamour for, and to support, accountability. Otherwise, it creates the perception that business doesn’t want to be accountable when it transgresses,” she said.
Michael Katz, chair of law firm ENSafrica, said there was a need to create a “competent, independent civil service, which would help in the formulation of policies”. Much of the corruption would have been flagged earlier had there been an independent civil service that wasn’t beholden to politicians.
And another executive said: “What will deliver change in our society is competent municipalities. So business needs to look at how to work with them, and capacitate them.”
So what about enforcement? While many cite the glacial pace of criminal prosecutions, Nichols said this wasn’t the most important factor in halting corruption. Rather, he said, it was about addressing the country’s cultural acceptance of the plague.
He cited a global study in which 99% of people stopped at a lone red traffic light in the middle of nowhere, even though there was zero chance of being caught for running it. But in a second experiment, if somebody in front of that driver went through the red light first, 40%-60% of the people behind them did the same.
“This is social licensing. They went through it, not because there was any greater chance of being caught, but because [running the light] became the norm. The thinking was: ‘Oh, well, we as a society don’t really follow this rule,’” he said.
The country is at the point where everything can happen, or nothing can happen
— Philip Nichols
Nichols tells the FM that one way to reduce the “social licence” given to corruption is by policing the “broken windows” — dealing swiftly with even minor incidents, to foster a culture of lawfulness.
“If Zuma were to end up in an orange jumpsuit, that would send a pretty strong message. But we shouldn’t think that by putting people in jail, it’ll scare everyone else into not doing it. It has more to do with the culture than the individual decision-maker,” he says.
This suggests that the ANC itself is at an inflection point.
The “licensing” of corruption within the party — through members voting for corruption-accused officials such as Zandile Gumede, supporting former health minister Zweli Mkhize in the presidential stakes or pushing to scrap the “step aside” rule — provides de facto social sanction, rather than a social penalty, for unethical behaviour.
Nichols agrees that the ANC appears to have tacitly condoned much of this behaviour but says it’s a positive sign that this isn’t universal and “there is contestation” in the party.
“The ANC deserves a lot of criticism. But a nuanced understanding that there are people within the ANC that get this issue, and empowering them, might be a useful approach, given the role that the ANC plays culturally in the country,” he says.
Conversely, if the more ethically untethered ANC officials were voted into the top structures of the party at December’s elective conference at Nasrec, it would send just as devastating a social signal about SA’s tolerance for corruption.
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