The rot of corruption has become rampant and reaches deep into communities around the country, South African Council of Churches (SACC) general secretary Bishop Malusi Mpumlwana told MPs this week.
People did not see the need to become educated because there were other ways to make money, while councillors and candidates for councillor positions were being killed because of the promise of money. Whistle-blowers feared for their lives.
The bishop told members of Parliament’s public enterprises committee, during the committee’s preparatory hearing ahead of its inquiry into corruption at state-owned enterprises, that it had become "commonplace" to find money in "inappropriate ways".
Mpumlwana said corruption at leadership level set the culture for lower levels of society, which could not be easily reversed.
This corruption was not confined to the political and government spheres. "There is a much broader decline in moral values," he said.
The SACC got a sense of the pervasiveness of corruption during its "unburdening process", which allowed those who had participated in or witnessed corruption to tell their stories confidentially to a panel.
SACC chairman in the Western Cape Rev Pieter Grove warned of the danger that corruption had gone so far that it could no longer be stopped.
"We are at a critical stage and if we don’t act we will slip down the slope" of becoming a mafia state, he said.
The director of the University of Witwatersrand Public Affairs Research Institute, Prof Ivor Chipkin, noted that there had been a profound weakening of state institutions, and a generalisation of illegality and criminality across the state — and not only in national departments.
The ability of state institutions to perform their mandates had deteriorated largely because they were politicised.
Chipkin also highlighted the complicity of the private sector, including legal and auditing firms, in facilitating the illegal removal of money from the country.
He was heartened, however, by the growing political will by civil society organisations and political parties to fight corruption.
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