For most of the past decade, South Africa’s national debate has been trapped in a dangerously comforting myth: that state capture and corruption were the singular achievement of Jacob Zuma and his criminal network that captured the state.
This has been the prevailing narrative of most coverage of the Zondo Commission, much of our political commentary, and many in business and civil society: that if Zuma was the patent zero of corruption, then removing him and prosecuting his allies would be the cure.
Well-meaning individuals and organisations have championed the view in public and private that opportunistic Zuma-era criminality and corruption was the murderous force behind the deaths of people like Babita Deokaran, Cloete and Thomas Murray, Zenzele Sithole, Mpho Mafole, and Bouwer van Niekerk. It is time to be honest about what really killed these people.
To hold to the notion that, as recently put on X by News24’s Pieter du Toit, these deaths represent the “Zuma years coming home to roost” is a simplistic fable that might satisfy our appetite for moral clarity, but it reduces a bloody national crisis to the malfeasance of one man, or at most one faction and family. It allows us to imagine that victory against the corrupt can be achieved through prosecutions, lifestyle audits, and the replacement of a few compromised leaders.
But this is, ultimately, a comfortable and dangerous lie. Zuma did not create the conditions of state capture. He simply used them to their inevitable and natural extent. The architecture of corruption in South Africa was in place long before 2009. It was carved out of the ANC’s fundamental ideological pillar: the belief in the socio-economic centrality of the state.
Out of this creed came the predictable features that make corruption a matter of ‘when’ and ‘who’ rather than ‘if’: the collection of vast resources through over-taxation, over-spending beyond practical or rational capacity, wide discretionary powers lodged in ministries, SOEs, and municipalities, and weak oversight where Parliament, watchdogs, and even the courts were compromised or dismissed.
When these features are in place, corruption is not an aberration but an inevitability. Just as rotting rubbish attracts rats, a bloated state with unchecked control over economic resources and power attracts the corrupt. South Africa’s fatal mistake has been to see corruption as the disease itself, rather than as a symptom of a policy disease.
Treating the fever
Commissions of inquiry, waves of prosecutions, and new codes of conduct might of course be necessary, but they amount to treating the fever while leaving the infection untouched. Unless the underlying conditions set by policy are changed, the fever will return, and the death toll will rise.
The experience in South Africa’s state-owned enterprises (SOEs) shows this clearly. Eskom and Transnet were not captured because they happened to be targeted by Zuma’s allies; they were captured because their very design made them irresistible.
They were monopolistic, politically protected, with billions to spend and almost no market discipline. Any faction in power, Zuma’s or another, would have been tempted to use them as vehicles for enrichment and control. To prevent future capture, the design itself must be altered.
We can look too to our public-procurement racket. Contracts worth hundreds of billions each year are filtered through sprawling bureaucracies where officials exercise wide discretion over tenders, exemptions, and supplier approvals. Oversight is weak, processes are opaque, and political pressure routinely overrides technical judgement.
The sheer scale of spending, combined with layers of cadres, discretion, and minimal accountability, makes procurement a perpetual magnet for the corrupt. No number of commissions, prosecutions or lifestyle audits will change the incentive for corruption entrenched in the South African public procurement system.
If we are serious about turning the tide of corruption, we need to look to countries that have effectively dealt with what we’re facing. And the lesson is a stark one: don’t try to outmatch the rats and put out more and more rat traps. Remove and destroy what’s attracting the rats in the first place.
Estonia provides a strong example on a liberation timeline similar to that of post-apartheid South Africa. Emerging from Soviet rule in the 1990s, it inherited a system saturated with bribery, permits, and bureaucratic favour-trading. Instead of attempting to prosecute its way to integrity, Estonia’s leaders radically cut back the state’s room for corruption.
Removed incentives
Taxes were simplified into a flat, low-rate system that removed incentives for rent-seeking. State companies were privatised, eliminating opportunities for political interference. Importantly, blazing a trail for what was to become the notion of e-governance, many government processes were digitised so that applications, contracts, and records could be managed without a human gatekeeper able to extract a bribe.
The link between state economic control and corruption is simple. As Mitchell, Boettke and Zhukov wrote of Estonia’s anti-corruption actions: “With government officials having less say over who could buy and who could sell, government officials were less likely to be bought and sold.”
This approach to rooting out corruption saw Estonia leap from being one of the most corrupt post-Soviet states to one of the cleanest in Europe in less than two decades.
Georgia after the Rose Revolution of 2003 offers an even more dramatic illustration, because the scale of its transformation was so abrupt and so unlikely. When Mikheil Saakashvili came to power, Georgia was ranked among the most corrupt states in the world. Police routinely stopped drivers for bribes, customs officials extracted payments for every truck crossing the border, and virtually every business needed to grease palms to obtain a licence.
Sound familiar?
Rather than tinker at the margins, the new government dismantled entire bureaucracies.
The notoriously corrupt traffic police force was simply disbanded overnight and rebuilt from scratch with fewer and better-qualified officers, higher salaries, and far tighter accountability. Georgia’s convoluted licensing regime was slashed from over 900 licensing demands to fewer than 150, and many were abolished altogether, depriving officials of their favourite rent-extraction tool.
Shrink the patronage machine
Customs and tax services were, following the Estonian example, digitised, cutting out the thousands of face-to-face interactions where bribes had traditionally been extorted. Ministries were merged or eliminated, and state employment was reduced dramatically to shrink the patronage machine. The results were astonishing.
In less than a decade, Georgia climbed more than a hundred places in the World Bank’s Ease of Doing Business rankings, and saw corruption levels plummet, according to Transparency International’s indices.
Ordinary Georgians went from seeing bribery as a fact of life to experiencing clean, predictable service delivery. Investors who had long avoided the country began to take it seriously as a place to do business. What mattered most was not that every corrupt official was punished, but that the avenues for corruption were structurally removed. The temptation and opportunity simply no longer existed in the same way. The relevance to South Africa is direct.
In our municipalities, bribes for zoning permits or building approvals are not unlike Georgia’s licensing rackets of the early 2000s.
Our customs and border posts, notorious for delays and inefficiencies, are equally vulnerable to the kinds of petty corruption that Georgia eliminated through automation and simplification.
Our overstaffed bureaucracies and proliferating state agencies, making lavish use of such rent-seeking, corruption-inducing mechanisms as BEE-based preferential public procurement, mirror Georgia’s pre-reform state: more effective as patronage schemes for the politically connected than as providers of services.
South Africa’s police, facing a collapse of legitimacy amid corruption scandals, are in a situation not far removed from the Georgian traffic police before their wholesale disbandment and rebuilding.
Georgia’s rapid success proves that systemic, structural reform, based on reducing discretionary power, shrinking the state’s reach, and simplifying processes, can achieve in a decade what endless commissions of inquiry and prosecutions cannot.
New Zealand’s transformation in the 1980s illustrates the same principle in a developed democracy.
Curbed overspending
Facing fiscal collapse and entrenched patronage in its SOEs, the government privatised inefficient enterprises, restructured procurement, and enforced new fiscal rules that curbed overspending. Patronage networks withered, not because new laws outlawed them, but because the opportunities for patronage no longer existed.
What is common to these examples of successful taming of government corruption is the recognition that corruption thrives when the people see their taxes flow to the coffers of a state that is bloated, stuffed to the brim with corruption-funnels through discretionary powers, and under-checked by co-equal branches of state.
Scaling back the financial appetite and role of the state, simplifying taxes, enforcing fiscal discipline, and removing bureaucratic systems and points where officials can drive patronage reduces corruption not rhetorically but structurally. Where governments have had the courage to accept that the bloated, self-aggrandising state itself is the disease, corruption as a symptom has diminished.
Where this insight has been refused, corruption has flourished. The South African state, to the extent that any benefit of the doubt can be entertained, has failed to turn the corruption tide because it would require a wholesale rejection of the state-centric socio-economic belief system entrenched by the apartheid-era’s quasi-socialism and the ANC’s overt dedication to the similarly government-knows-best centralisation of the National Democratic Revolution.
For the ANC, the state is not merely an administrator in service of the people, but the cockpit from which to control the existence of its subjects. Every proposal to privatise, deregulate, or limit state discretion is treated not as a reform but as a betrayal. Yet the evidence is unavoidable: the more power, money, and discretion the state hoards, the more corruption it generates.
Prevented at source
Conversely, where the state’s role is limited and disciplined, corruption is not only prosecuted after the fact, but prevented at source. The country’s crisis cannot be solved by scapegoating or even prosecuting with laser-like focus one corrupt man, one captured administration, or one kleptocratic ANC faction. That is a comforting illusion which leaves the real problem untouched. The real crisis is systemic, born of the ideology of state centrality that continues to stir into the mix the core ingredients of corruption: over-taxation, over-spending, discretionary patronage, and weak oversight.
Until this is confronted by the whole of society, from politicians to commentators, businesses to voters, South Africa will not escape the stranglehold of corruption. Blaming Zuma alone allows the ANC to claim that renewal means simply changing personnel, while leaving the architecture of the state untouched.
It convinces business and civil society that the problem lies with bad actors, not bad policies. It reassures citizens that justice is about trials, not about substantive structural reform that closes the taps of patronage privilege.
While the ingredients of corruption remain in the mix, the country will keep mistaking corruption as a thing in and of itself and not the preventable consequence of an ideological obsession with a powerful state. The lesson from countries like Estonia, Georgia, and New Zealand is that corruption can be tamed, but only by treating the disease itself.
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR.
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