After 16 months of the organisation's existence, the Executive Director of Corruption Watch Dr Dave Lewis was able to report that citizens are becoming more active in reporting instances of corruption, with over 4 000 reports filed so far.
After 16 months of the organisation's existence, the Executive Director of Corruption Watch Dr Dave Lewis was able to report that citizens are becoming more active in reporting instances of corruption, with over 4 000 reports filed so far.
“The central pillar of our approach is to encourage the public to report their experiences of corruption,” he said.
“It creates vital intelligence, without which it is not possible to fight corruption.”
This intelligence provides verifiable information about hotspots of corruption and this approach gives the public the opportunity to actively engage in combating it.
“This intelligence, this empirical data enables us to mount focused campaigns like the one we are in the process of generating around schools' corruption,” said Lewis.
“For those in marginalised communities, corruption is the extra classroom that didn’t get built; it’s the sports team that didn’t get their equipment because a school principal or a school governing body has spent the money on a weekend team-building exercise in Mozambique – one of the genuine reports that we received,” said Lewis.
Lewis presented the organisation’s findings in a public lecture on 14 May.
A significant number of the reports received relate to corruption in schools and in the management of small-town municipal resources.
Lewis noted, however, that according to the data they have collected from the reports, corruption hotspots in the Eastern Cape differ significantly from national statistics in a number of sectors.
According to the national figures, reports of corruption relating to small town municipal finances amount to only 43%.
However, 80% of the reports received from the Eastern Cape were directed at the mismanagement of finances within small-town municipalities.
Nepotism was also reported as being prevalent in the Eastern Cape: amounting to 16% of the reports received, in comparison to the national figure of 11%.
Lewis noted that this form of corruption relates closely to other instances of small-town municipal corruption: when public officials are appointed based on favour, friendship or familial connection, they are well-positioned to later facilitate other forms of corruption.
Lewis reported that in the Eastern Cape alone there are said to be about 9 000 procurement points.
Due to the nature and quantity of these clusters of corruption, there is a greater possibility for resistance to reform by powerful local interests, something to which the mismanagement of small-town municipal finances is particularly vulnerable.
“It also enables those in a provincial capital, who have engineered the appointment of the Municipal Manager to excise one site, which is becoming exposed to law enforcement or the media, without compromising multiple other sites,” Lewis explained of these clusters of corruption.
In addition to these prevalent forms of corruption, Lewis noted that Eastern Cape civil servants and public officials frequently do business with companies they own.
Lewis asserted that by more and more citizens reporting instances of corruption, officials will pay greater attention.
“Active citizens talking loudly and forthrightly, is the mechanism of change in a democratic society because it will force those is power to listen, to take action, or to account for their inaction,” he said.
