A year after Rhodes was the first South African institution to sign the Corruption Watch pledge the local university is challenging the rest of the city to become a corruption-free zone.
A year after Rhodes was the first South African institution to sign the Corruption Watch pledge the local university is challenging the rest of the city to become a corruption-free zone.
“Corruption affects us all,” as the Corruption Watch pledge states. “It weakens our democracy and trust in our leaders; it eats away at our ethics and corrodes our moral fibre; it discourages public and private investment and reduces its efficiency thus slowing growth and development.”
Discussing how the university plans to meaningfully realise its pledge at a recent meeting, Vice-Chancellor Saleem Badat said, “It is not enough to merely sign. We need to think: 'what does this really mean for you?'
“The signing needs to constitute something more substantive. Those who sign it need to live this out. We need to look at what constitutes corrupt behaviour.”
To keep citizens abreast, Badat said a public meeting will be held on Tuesday to affirm its anti-corruption stance, instate a multi-stakeholder, anti-corruption programme and ultimately challenge the whole of Grahamstown to commit to stand against corruption.
The open lecture by Corruption Watch Executive Director Dr Dave Lewis begins at 5.30pm at the Barratt Lecture Complex on campus.
By being open about its own processes, Badat said the university hopes to be a catalyst and encourage other constituencies to follow suit. “Before pointing fingers at others, we must ask ourselves if this happens in our backyard,” Badat said.
“The university will do everything it can to bring everything to book. This should apply from cleaners to senior administration officials and we will not hide those things. Even one case is too much, but we will not hide those.”
To this end, the university plans to establish internal anti-corruption measures through its Enterprise Risk Management Office, which has the power to go above the office of the vice-chancellor.
“Corruption is an issue in this country. I don’t know of a single country where it is not,” said Badat. “However, we should unite and prove that there is one institution in South Africa where corruption does not happen very easily.”
Examples of how Rhodes plans to initiate anti-corruption processes include codes of conduct for all university committees, as well as staff being required to declare all potential conflicts of interest at the beginning of each year.
With this model in place, Rhodes then hopes to cascade the campaign throughout town and invite others to participate.
“Let’s present a common commitment and a united front,” Badat said.
It was then suggested that an external and independent committee must be set up to actively monitor corrupt behaviour throughout Grahamstown.
The thinking behind this is that since Corruption Watch is a national organisation, a localised body is necessary to ensure the town is adequately monitored.
More than anything though, for a corruption-free town to be a possibility its different sectors need to think about how they can hold each other to account.
