Just more than a year ago, African heads of State and government converged on the Ethiopian capital of Addis Ababa to launch 2018 as the continent’s Anticorruption Year. No stone was going to be left unturned in the fight to rid Mother Africa of this pernicious scourge, which continued to deal body blows to socioeconomic development, speaker after speaker pontificated at that jamboree.
But, once they were back in their countries, did they walk the talk? Many of us believed they would, but the proof of the pudding was always going to be in the eating. The first objective indicator since the January 2018 shindig of our performance on the anticorruption front has just come out: the latest iteration of graft watchdog Transparency International’s Corruption Perception Index (CPI), which ranks 180 countries and territories by their perceived levels of public-sector corruption.
For a continent that spent – or supposedly spent – the whole of last year exorcising this demon from our midst, one would have expected to see significant African representation among the top-performing nations on the CPI. But there was dololo, with the highest- ranked African nation being Botswana, at number 34 out of 180. It secured this ranking by attaining a score of 61, the same as last year and one up on 2017. The CPI ranges from 0 to 100, with 100 indicative of a ‘very clean’ public sector and 0 signifying corruption that stinks to high heaven – perhaps of the type allegedly perpetrated by the likes of the Guptas and the Watsons in South Africa. But a score of 100 has proved to be an elusive aspiration. Denmark, the least- corrupt country in 2018, for example, managed a score of only 88, the same as in 2017. It did better in 2016 and 2015, when it attained scores of 90 and 91 respectively.
Rwanda, which has been on the ascendancy in the anticorruption stakes since 2015, achieved a score of 56 to secure second position on the continent and number 48 globally. The country’s President, Paul Kagame, was at the helm of the African Union in 2018, and it is befitting that it performed so spectacularly during his tenure.
Namibia missed the global top 50 by just two rungs; it was ranked 52, having attained a score of 53, up from 51 the previous year. Mauritius, which, like Botswana and Namibia, is in our Southern African Development Community neck of the woods, was ranked 56th, with its score having jumped from 50 in 2017 to 51 in 2018. But the improvement was not enough to take it back to the high of 54 achieved in 2016.
Naturally, when I got my hands on the 2018 CPI report (it came through as a PDF), I was eager to find out how our beloved Mzansi had fared. I looked at the first page – dololo. Pages 2 and 3, ditto. It appears only on the fourth page, tied at number 73 with Morocco and ranking below such countries as São Tomé and Principe, and Senegal. South Africa’s score of 43 was the same as in 2017 and lower than 2016’s 45 and 2015’s 44. We are going downhill. But this should be no surprise, really, given the kind of stuff coming out of the State Capture Commission of Inquiry, chaired by Deputy Chief Justice Raymond Zondo. We must thank our lucky stars that we do not have more characters like the Guptas and the Watsons, who, according to witness testimony at the commission, are the very avatars of corruption. Otherwise, our ranking would be much, much lower.
A consolation is that none of the African countries recorded any significant decline – the poor performers largely flat-lined – and ‘the countries to watch’ list does not feature any African country. What’s more, two countries – Senegal and Côte d’Ivoire – made the ‘improved’ list.
But African countries need to do more to rid themselves of this scourge, which is holding back development and ensuring that million continue to wallow in poverty. In South Africa, corruption hives R27-billion off the country’s gross domestic product each year and deprives an estimated 60 000 people of job opportunities.