Interrogating corruption: Lessons from South Africa

Abstract

Government, the private sector, and society at large need to appreciate the war on an insidious and cancerous phenomenon that requires concerted, strategic and comprehensive arrangements and initiatives to be implemented if we are to actually arrest and then reverse its current proliferation: Corruption. This cannot occur if government and society do not move beyond the various one and two dimensional approaches that are advocated by various anti-corruption proponents. Hence, a sociological dissection of corruption needs to establish the reasons that lead to an environment becoming characterised by loss of ethical standards, the compelling need for individuals to satisfy their own personal financial and material interests, the opportunities to do so, and the absence of sufficient deterrents not to do so. These processes are instrumental in raising the levels of corrupt behaviour to a point where a broad culture of corruption develops, or to the severe detriment of an entire country. A sociological analysis of corruption will be instrumental in showing how corruption can reach proportions that have a significantly negative bearing on a country’s wellbeing, in terms of its impact on the national economy and development prospects, the political institutions and the public administration. The paper illustrates that without the utilisation of sociological imagination and its well researched empirical manifestations, the efforts to eliminate corruption are in danger of been in vain. The case of South Africa will provide the empirical dimension of the phenomenon in question.