When Samora Machel said “tribalism is the commander in chief of African problems,” he meant that ethnic divisions and hatred were a leading continental challenge that threatened to collapse the grand Pan-African dream. Machel, the thoroughgoing Pan-Africanist that he was, invested in African unity, peace, and progress.
The late Mozambican leader put Africa, not just his own country, to heart. It is for that reason that he was the leader who named “corruption the cancer that is eating Africa away” at an alarming pace.
One may appreciate the vivid metaphor of a cancer to express the problem of corruption in the continent of Africa whose majority poor people deserve access to basic resources, goods and services, healthcare, education, water and sanitation, decent shelter, transport and communication. I, however, find the metaphor fatalist in that a cancer may be that malady which is largely incurable and may therefore suggest that Africans can do nothing to stop corruption.
Corruption can be stopped when political will meets commitment and gets popular support in any country. The late Singaporean leader, Lee Kuan Yew, in his good book; The Singapore Story: Memoirs of Lee Kuan Yew, details how under his leadership the Asian country literally abolished corruption. Today Singapore is severally listed as the least corrupt country in the world where, it is storied, one can leave a bag of money in the street overnight and still find it tomorrow morning. If the private money of an individual Singaporean can be that safe, public money is even safer under the care of honest and patriotic public servants.
One can fall for the strong temptation to believe that Singapore must be a paradise on earth where angels live. But corruption was rampant in Singapore until the leadership and the population agreed that it was the time to do something firm, not just to combat, but to literally put a stop to the sin.
The theft, especially of public resources, is punishable by the death penalty in Singapore. It is by the strong hand, the pain of death, that Singapore stopped corruption.
Not that I am about to advocate for the death penalty in Africa. Not even that I am about to glorify the strong hand anywhere. I only think that African countries need to take strong measures to stop the strong problem of corruption in Africa. In his provocative book, Why Africa is Poor: And what Africans can do about it, Greg Mills names corruption as one of causes of the abject poverty of Africans whose feet walk on the biggest bounty of natural resources in the world.
The South African case
South Africa, easily the most telling sample of an African country, has given public corruption a nickname, “state capture.” This nickname for public corruption in South Africa troubles me a little because I believe that the states in Africa, as colonial inventions and impositions, were born captured by Empire in shape of the Euro-American octopus. Slavery and colonialism, in my view, were the first cases of large-scale corruption in Africa.
That a human being could be sold and bought as a commodity, and that some foreigners could invade the territory of other people and forcibly rule them is corruption at its obscene and its spectacular expression. Apartheid that segregated black Africans out of the mainstream economy, politics, and geography of the country was corruption at a grand scale.
To observe that slavery, colonialism, and apartheid were corruption must not in any way be taken to be an apology for and to explain away the corruption and cozenage of the African elites. What should be done is to put some African elites on the spot for being dishonest and corrupt like the colonialists. Imitating and reproducing colonialism by being corrupt should make African elites are ashamed.
The outgoing CEO of Eskom, the South African public energy utility, Andre Marinus de Ruyter, has alarmed the nation by publicly alleging that the real reason there is an energy crisis in the country is corruption. The public disclosure has not only alarmed but has also angered South Africans that have been feeling the weight of darkness under the strict regime of load-shedding that Eskom has deployed.
Some analysts have expressed fear that the African National Congress (ANC) may lose power in the coming elections because of the bold disclosures of a man many understood as a terrific manager that was going to turn around the energy fortunes of the country but has had to resign.
Other analysts are not surprised by the disclosures citing the known history of state capture in the Republic. Other analysts feel that de Ruyter is just another white man that has found an opportunity, and is using his strategic position, to defame black politicians as thieves and an incompetent lot.
It is presently profitless to join the debate on the rightness or wrongness of de Ruyter.
The stubborn moral is that corruption is a deep developmental problem in South Africa and in Africa at large. It is a strong problem that is crying out for strong solutions, lest the continent and its people sink deeper into the mud of poverty and misery. Precious African resources that must attend to the condition of the deserving majority of the continent will continue to evaporate into the pockets of a few but powerful elites that may be called the new colonisers in Africa.
Can corruption be stopped in Africa?
The answer is yes. Singapore and many other countries have stopped corruption in its ugly and cancerous steps. There is an unfortunate public belief in many African countries that corruption is an inevitable part of human nature that we can do nothing about. More unfortunate is the tendency to glorify public corruption by giving heroism to corrupt individuals.
Even more unfortunate is the resignation to the misery by Africans that corruption is now so normalised and naturalised in Africa that nothing can be done. Taking public office as “our turn to eat” as some say is unfortunate in Africa. I believe that corruption can be educated and punished out of Africans if political will meets commitment and public support.
Corruption in Africa is not only a problem of leadership but is also a problem of followership, in many ways. Since corruption has become a kind of culture in Africa, it may require a firm hand to stop. It is possible to turn anti-corruption into a national culture in any African country.
* Cetshwayo Zindabazezwe Mabhena writes from Gezina, Pretoria, in South Africa.
