Control of corruption must be achieved for democracy to succeed

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In the 28 years that the World Bank has been monitoring South Africa’s control of corruption via its annual worldwide governance indicators (WGIs), the country has gone steadily downhill in that regard. From the first appearance in 1996, when South Africa achieved a respectable percentile rank of 76.3 on a scale of zero to 100 (lowest to highest), it has slid to a dismal 45.8 in 2023 – its second lowest ranking ever, following the even more dismal 43.9 in 2022.

South Africans are already well aware of the steady entrenchment of corruption in the public and private sectors, and society in general. Corruption will always be present, but it’s the degree to which it is successfully controlled that can make or break a country – and its residents.

Apart from the immediately apparent economic and societal reasons, control of corruption is important in terms of assessing the quality and effectiveness of governance. It is defined in various ways which are all more or less similar, but the Anticorruption Report is particularly articulate with its definition as “the capacity of a society to constrain individual corrupt behaviour (defined as particular distribution of public goods leading to undue private profit) in order to enforce the norm of individual integrity in public service and politics as well as to uphold a state that is free from capture by particular interest”.  

Control of corruption is one of the six categories the World Bank uses to compile its annual WGIs for over 200 nations and territories. The WGIs are based on “views of a large number of enterprise, citizen, and expert survey respondents in industrial and developing countries”.

South Africa was not doing too badly in the late 1990s and early 2000s, showing relatively better performance compared to more recent years. However, in 2007 its percentile score took a sharp dive from 69.7 to 61.7. Before that its lowest score had been 64.6 in 2003. Since then, there has been no coming back. In the period between 2012 and 2022 it hovered among the average-performing countries, and finally slipped to below 50 in 2022, indicating a trend of below-average performance in controlling corruption.

Other indices such as Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index – which, as the name indicates, measures perceptions of the extent of corruption in a country – corroborate the decline. The most recent edition of the index (2023) shows South Africa reaching its lowest score ever, managing just 41 on a scale of 0 to 100, and coming in below the global average of 43.

Back to the WGIs, it is also clear to see that South Africa’s state capture period, spanning roughly 2009 to 2018, showed a marked deterioration in corruption control metrics as the rank fell from the 60^th percentile into the 50^th – and now recently, solidly into the 40^th.

It will be interesting to see what the 2024 score will be – watch this space.

More about control of corruption

Control of corruption is one of three indicators used to place a country on a continuum between greater corruption and better governance, says Colette Ashton of the Institute for Security Studies in her recent study titled Rethinking anti-corruption in South Africa: pathways to reform. This statement references the 2017 book edited by Alina Mungiu-Pippidi and Michael Johnston, titled Transitions to Good Governance: Creating Virtuous Circles of Anti-corruption. Both editors are highly respected political scientists, specialising in democracy matters.

The other two indicators, state the editors, are the Corruption Risk indicator from the PRS Group’s International Country Risk Guide, and indicators of particularism from country diagnoses undertaken by researchers. Particularism in corruption terms refers to a societal tendency to prioritise personal connections and favours over universal (often abstract) rules and fairness, leading to situations which facilitate corrupt practices. 

A declining control of corruption may indicate that an existing window of opportunity for anti-corruption reform is closing, adds Ashton.

More about governance

Governance, says the World Bank, “consists of the traditions and institutions by which authority in a country is exercised. This includes a) the process by which governments are selected, monitored, and replaced; b) the capacity of the government to effectively formulate and implement sound policies; and c) the respect of citizens and the state for the institutions that govern economic and social interactions among them”.

The WGIs use six broad dimensions of governance, two for each of the above-mentioned three aspects with which it assesses governance. Each dimension has its own set of indicators, from which the overall index is compiled. Over 200 countries and territories have been scrutinised between 1996 and 2023.

The six governance dimensions are:

(a) The process by which governments are selected, monitored, and replaced:

• Voice and Accountability captures perceptions and views of the extent to which a country’s citizens can participate in selecting their government, as well as freedom of expression, freedom of association, and a free media.
• Political Stability and Absence of Violence/Terrorism captures perceptions and views of the likelihood that the government will be destabilised or overthrown by unconstitutional or violent means, including politically-motivated violence and terrorism.

(b) The capacity of the government to effectively formulate and implement sound policies:

• Government Effectiveness captures perceptions and views of the quality of public services, the quality of the civil service and the degree of its independence from political pressures, the quality of policy formulation and implementation, and the credibility of the government’s commitment to such policies.
• Regulatory Quality captures perceptions and views of the ability of the government to formulate and implement sound policies and regulations that permit and promote private sector development.

(c) The respect of citizens and the state for the institutions that govern economic and social interactions among them:

• Rule of Law captures perceptions and views of the extent to which agents have confidence in and abide by the rules of society, in particular the quality of contract enforcement, property rights, the police, and the courts, as well as the likelihood of crime and violence.
• Control of Corruption captures perceptions and views of the extent to which public power is exercised for private gain, including both petty and grand forms of corruption, as well as “capture” of the state by elites and private interests.

The WGIs are produced by Daniel Kaufmann of the Natural Resource Governance Institute and Brookings Institution, and Aart Kraay of the World Bank Development Research Group. Kaufmann was an early expert witness at the Zondo commission hearings, testifying on the effects of state capture. He and Kraay offer four reasons for the use of perceptions data in compiling the WGIs:

• Perceptions matter, because households and firms make decisions based on their views and perceptions of the quality of governance.
• Not all dimensions of governance, such as corruption, leave a paper trail.
• Data capturing respondents’ perceptions and views can provide valuable information on the gap between de jure rules and their de facto implementation.
• Unlike objective indicators that capture the existence of specific laws, rules, and regulations, data capturing survey and expert respondents’ views are not susceptible to “gaming” where policy makers target reforms to narrowly change specific measures simply because they happen to be included in an aggregate indicator that they wish to influence.

Perceptions data are not the only type that is relevant for measuring governance, say Kaufmann and Kraay, but they do bring “valuable insights that can be used in conjunction with other types of information to measure governance across countries and over time”.