By Lehlohonolo Lehana.
National Director of Public Prosecutions, Advocate Shamila Batohi has flagged a lack of good governance and ethical leadership as the root cause of corruption in local municipalities.
Batohi was addressing the launch of the Local Government Anti-Corruption Forum (LGACF) and the Local Government Ethical Leadership Initiative by Cooperative Governance and Traditional Affairs (CoGTA) Minister, Dr Nkosazana Dlamini Zuma.
The LGACF was established in October 2020 under the chairship of the Special Investigating Unit (SIU), supported by the Department of Cooperative Governance (DCOG) as the Secretariat.
The forum was formed with the intention to foster collaboration and coordination amongst the various stakeholders at the local government level on anti-corruption matters.
Batohi said while government has good crime fighting strategies, the country often does not implement these.
“Together in law enforcement, we are working really hard on the reactive side of fighting corruption. But let us [face facts]: the root cause – particularly in the local government space – is a lack of good governance and ethical leadership. That is where we need to focus,” she said.
The NDPP reiterated that the country cannot “investigate and prosecute” itself from the problem of corruption, “as long we do not attend to the root cause”.
“If you look at our anti-corruption strategy, there is a huge part of it that deals with the preventative side, which requires a huge range of government stakeholders to come to the party,” she said.
Delivering the keynote address, the Dlamini Zuma said where there is good governance, there is “little room for corruption”.
“If there’s accountability, you minimise corruption. If there’s integrity, you minimise (corruption). If you are value-driven, you also minimise corruption. So we can’t just talk about the end result, you must talk about the whole value chain.
“If the value chain is right, the end result will be right. If the value chain is wrong, then the end-result will be wrong. We must have ethics, integrity, accountability and good governance,” she said.
Corruption, she said, was “an end result of an unethical behaviour, bad governance and non-accountable leadership”.
She also decried the time it takes for cases to be finalised in court after the initial arrest of suspects, saying this has the potential to discredit police investigations and prosecutions.
“It erodes the trust in (law enforcement systems),” she said.
Special Investigating Unit (SIU) head, Adv. Andy Mothibi, said corruption is prevailing in every sector of society, and not just local government.
An anti-corruption vulnerable sector risk assessment conducted by the National Anti-Corruption Local Government Ethical Leadership Initiative (LGELI) found that corruption is perverse in all sectors of society.
The exercise identified risks in the health, local government, infrastructure, border management, State-owned entities, education, NPOs, and energy sector, among others.
Mothibi said the fight against corruption was an urgent one. He revealed that they were currently investigating several municipalities.
Speaking at the same forum, Lt-General Godfrey Lebeya, the head of the Hawks, said their intervention to fight corruption in local municipalities was through the National Clean Audit Task Team.
He said as a result of this work, they had been able to nab several officials and politicians suspected of corruption in municipalities like eThekwini and Newcastle in the province of KwaZulu-Natal.
“There are 291 matters that have been prioritised for investigation. Out of these, 75 of these are already on the court roll while 29 are being considered by prosecuting authorities to determine whether prosecution needs to be instituted or otherwise.
“187 of these matters are still under investigation. As I have indicated, part of ACTT (Anti-Corruption Task Team) is to focus investigation of the municipalities.
There are currently 452 cases which affect the municipalities; of these 122 are already on the court roll.
“It just needs to be noted that when I say 122 cases, I don’t mean 122 individuals. You find that in one case there are actually more than 10 individuals.
“We may have cited other examples where there are 22… there are 252 matters that are at the investigation level,” Lebeya said, citing eThekwini and Newcastle where 56 people were arrested in 11 cases.