South Africa has been talking about accountability for far longer than the democratic era.
The Madlanga commission of inquiry and parliamentary ad hoc committee investigating allegations made by KwaZulu-Natal police commissioner Lt-Gen Nhlanhla Mkhwanazi may again place the issue centre stage, but the national lament about corruption is hardly new.
From Nkandla and Bosasa to Eskom — and long before that, from Cecil John Rhodes to Paul Kruger — each generation of South Africans seems convinced its moment is uniquely rotten. South Africans consistently believe the present is corrupt and the past was pristine. Of course it never was.
The question is therefore not whether corruption exists (it always has) but whether we understand what actually curbs it and how to eliminate it.
What causes corruption?
Towards the end of last year I attended a South African Local Government Association conference where representatives from local governments, academia and nonprofit organisations discussed new approaches to the legacy problems facing municipalities. Accountability rightly dominated many of the discussions. Local government across much of the country is visibly collapsing, and corruption is central to the failure.
The reflexive proposed solutions to corruption remains predictable: more rules, laws, and regulations. The national response to municipalities failing includes broadening the Public Service Commission’s mandate, introducing new procurement frameworks, or rebranding co-ordination and oversight through initiatives such as the District Development Model. Keep adding more policies, as if corruption is simply the result of insufficient paperwork.
The more procedural choke points inserted between citizens and service delivery, or between entrepreneurs and lawful economic activity, the more opportunities arise for bribery, rent-seeking and political gatekeeping. Complexity is corruption’s currency.
South Africa does not suffer from a shortage of rules. It is best illustrated at local government level. Local governments have no fewer than about 250 pieces of legislation that govern their workings. However, this heap of legislative paperwork has not stopped rampant municipal corruption. South Africa clearly suffers from a shortage of implementation and, above all, of consequences, not a shortage of rules.
The accountability: the belief that sophisticated plans on paper can substitute effective enforcement. The more procedural choke points inserted between citizens and service delivery, or between entrepreneurs and lawful economic activity, the more chances arise for bribery, rent-seeking and political gatekeeping. Complexity is corruption’s currency.
Our instinct to fight corruption with more rules or laws frequently achieves the opposite. This impulse to respond to failure with more laws and regulations does not come from the electorate, but from the bureaucracy itself. Officials and policy technocrats, confronted daily with collapsing systems and weak enforcement capacity, reach instinctively for the available tools: drafting rules, frameworks, strategies and compliance layers.
Their power is administrative, not electoral, so their lever is rule-making. In that sense the proliferation of regulation is understandable as an attempt to “do something” within the confines of bureaucratic authority.
Rules do not substitute for accountability, and bureaucratic fixes cannot replicate democratic discipline. In contrast, the electorate’s lever is not regulation but elections and the ability to remove failing leaders. Yet our public conversation treats corruption as a technical governance or structural problem rather than a political one.
Electoral accountability does not directly discipline bureaucrats. It disciplines the political leadership that controls the environment in which bureaucrats operate. When electoral competition is real, politicians have an incentive to professionalise appointments, enforce consequence management, insist on transparent procurement processes and support internal disciplinary mechanisms that would otherwise be politically inconvenient.
Municipal managers are removed instead of recycled, officials are suspended rather than quietly redeployed, and supply chain irregularities are escalated rather than buried. Electoral vulnerability sharpens the political will to assert oversight over administration, and this political will is the difference between rules that exist only on paper and systems that function in practice.
Though bureaucratic corruption often survives political transitions, elections remain the only force capable of breaking that insulation. The contrasting experiences of reformist and stagnant municipalities demonstrate institutional rot is not immutable; it persists primarily if political leadership lacks the courage or the incentive to confront it.
Basic accountability
In discussing plans to address corruption we obsess over elaborate solutions to the hardest 20% of the problem, while neglecting the simplest tool that addresses the remaining 80%. There is a tendency to concentrate reform efforts on complex policy interventions while neglecting foundational accountability mechanisms.
Basic democratic accountability remains the most powerful anticorruption mechanism any society possesses. Officials who govern badly or corruptly should be voted out. No commission, amendment, procurement regulation or strategy document approaches the disciplining power of electoral consequences.
Whatever its flaws, South Africa’s democracy remains functional. The dire predictions of a “Night of the Long Knives” after the ANC’s electoral decline did not materialise in 2024 as many doomsdayers predicted. Political power is no longer largely monopolised by a single party. Though coalitions are messy and South Africa has had to navigate the arrival of coalition politics and governance, it signals a maturing of our electoral system. Our democracy continues to provide citizens with the ultimate lever of accountability.
This type of accountability in South Africa is demonstrably possible. Where political competition has had real consequences, standards have improved. The Western Cape and local governments in the province provide the clearest example: successive clean audits, stable infrastructure delivery, consistently better service outcomes and lower levels of maladministration have coincided with uninterrupted DA governance.
At a local level municipalities such as Cape Town and uMngeni show how institutional stability with political incentives can translate into competent administration. These cases confirm the basic democratic truth that when voters reward performance and punish failure, parties adapt or are replaced.
The DA and its coalition partners operate under continuous electoral pressure. They cannot rely on historic loyalty to excuse dysfunction. For the DA and its coalition partners good governance is not merely an ethical preference, it is a matter of electoral survival. Clean audits, functioning procurement systems and visible service delivery are not PR luxuries but political necessities.
No party in South Africa is subjected to the level of scrutiny the DA faces. Every procurement misstep, service outage or internal administrative failure is highlighted by opposition parties, civil society, national government and major media outlets, often with a ferocity unmatched elsewhere in the political system.
Even the hint of lapse involving a DA politician is treated as morally equivalent or at the same level of scrutiny as the large-scale, systemic corruption that has wholly characterised ANC governance over the past two decades.
This relentless oversight creates a political culture in which systems are constantly stress-tested, deviations are corrected quickly, and incompetence is far more likely to trigger consequence management rather than quiet redeployment elsewhere.
In the long run it benefits the DA by institutionalising competence as an electoral asset. Despite what many of the commentariat suggest, the DA retains the electorate’s confidence where it governs.
Accountability is not produced by layered regulations or moral exhortation, but by the incentives created when political power is genuinely contestable. Where that incentive exists, clean governance follows.
• Eloff, a writer and nonprofit executive, is a legal adviser to the mayor of Cape Town. He writes in his personal capacity.
Would you like to comment on this article?
Sign up (it's quick and free) or sign in now.
Please read our Comment Policy before commenting.