Cape Town, South Africa (PANA) – The “insidious cancer of corruption” is the biggest threat facing South Africa’s democracy, according to Cape Town’s Anglican Archbishop Thabo Makgoba.
Delivering the Beyers Naude Memorial Lecture at the Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University Monday night, Archbishop Makgoba also criticised suggestions that criminalising corruption was a “Western paradigm”.
“Actually, I think it’s the other way around,” he said. “Corruption is a two-way street, a two-way transaction. For corruption to happen, you have to have a corrupter, someone willing to pay the bribe and someone willing to take a bribe. For Africans, over the 50 or 60 years since liberation, the Western paradigm – if indeed there can be said to be one – is one in which Westerners have been the corrupters, and African elites the corruptees.”
The Archbishop also quoted from the African Union’s 2003 “Convention On Preventing And Combating Corruption”, which said corruption and impunity had “devastating effects on the economic and social development of the African peoples”.
He said corruption is paralysing progress across South Africa.
“We all know about the high-profile cases which dominate the headlines, whether they concern Nkandla (the President Jacob Zuma housing scandal) or provincial departments here in the Eastern Cape.
”But for every one of those cases, there are many more – I am sure it is thousands across the country – which go unreported. The moral compasses guiding our leaders and public servants are misaligned,” the cleric said.
