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Wow that is a nice chunk of change there. 700 Billion lost in 20 years due to corruption. Being a curios fellow the first thing I did was whip out my calculator and do a couple of sums. The second thing I did was hit Google to see how this compares to other countries. What I found is quite interesting.
Before I go any further the below is in no way any type of excuse or justification it is simply putting things into perspective (something I find a rare commodity in South Africa).
Poking around on Google I found quite an interesting piece by Cheol Liu, Department of Public Policy at City University of Hong Kong, and John Mikesell, at Indiana University Bloomington.
http://news.indiana.edu/releases/iu/2014/06/cost-of-corruption-paper.shtml .
This deals with the cost of corruption at state level in the USA.
The figures below are all in US Dollars to make things easier (I took the exchange rate at 10/1) Also we need to note that the figures are taken from the 10 worst states and only deal with State level corruption, not National.
First let us break down the South African figures:
$70 000 000 000 over the last 20 years
$ 3 500 000 000 Per year average
$ 67 per capita per year (working on 52 million population)
According to the study the cost of corruption in the 10 chosen states are $1,308 per capita (population of these states are 34 million). Now this makes it look like the
USA is in a worse state than SA! But of course you need to look a bit further than that as the USA has a GDP of around $16770 per capita and SA has GDP of around $662 (roughly a ratio of 25/1).
So if we now divide the USA figure by 25 we have a figure of $52.32 per capita for the USA and $67.00 per capita for SA. Seeing that the USA figures only deal with State level corruption and does not include national level corruption it seems to me that the USA and South Africa are pretty much on a par.
That being said, why is it that there never a day that goes by without news in South Africa coming up with new allegations of corruption?
Is it that we have a much greater number of state officials that are corrupt and are just taking a lower amount percentage wise compared with their US counterparts?
Or is it that they are just not as smart and/or devious?
Personally I think they just do not care, think of it, in SA no matter what you do you probably have a 1% chance of being caught and convicted.
Looking at the above it seems that if you are not corrupt you are pretty stupid as you have much more to gain than to loose.
What we need to do is to stop muddying the waters with totally irrelevant nonsense, for example The dress code in parliament! Not to mention Nkandla which cost the nation the princely sum of R4:00 per capita.
The only way to curb corruption is to make a visible impact on it in a way that will show people that crime does not pay. The most visible and widespread form of corruption is our famous Lunch Money Squad AKA the Metro police. While this seems to be an almost insurmountable problem the solution is really simple.
If our major cities each rig up 4 scrap-ish looking cars with cameras and microphones and just drive them around for a month. At the end of that month arrest ALL of the officers that took bribes on camera (on the same day). The amount of officers arrested would be huge, but in one simple move more will have been done in the fight against corruption (especially psychologically) then in the last 20 years.
Corruption will never be eradicated; it can be minimized, but not as long as people are not afraid of getting caught. The length of sentence has no bearing on the decision to commit crime of any sort. Whether it be 2 years or the death sentence, if people believe they will get away with it, the fight is lost.
