A Year In Review: There Was Plenty More In 2024

These days, it can be tempting to focus only on the negative. As South Africans, we’ve had, after all, another rather challenging year. And I’m not suggesting we don’t acknowledge the bad things that have happened. But I think it’s also important not to let them completely overshadow the positive aspects of the year.

Fraud and Corruption in South Africa: What Have We Learned

This quote from their 2023 paper, The World’s Anti-Corruption Efforts Need a Reset, sums up exactly where we’re going wrong in our efforts to fight fraud and corruption in South Africa.
We need to combat the grass roots behaviour that promotes corruption in our country if we are ever to stand a chance of winning this seemingly unwinnable war.
 
 

Building Trust in the Public Sector: A Call for Accountability

Only 17% of South Africans believe our leaders tell the truth, and often use euphemisms to mask the realities of governance failures and incompetence, corporate exploitation, and individual greed.
 
 

The Best Government Money Can Buy: How Corrupt SEO Bailouts are Bankrupting Our Country

On December 8, 2020, business, labour and government signed an agreement stating that money from the Government Employees Pension Fund (GEPF) would be used to fund yet another bailout for Eskom.
Geordin Hill-Lewis, the DA’s Shadow Minister of Finance called the deal a betrayal of workers and the public.
Which is pretty much what can be said for every single bailout the government has ever given to our limping State Owned Enterprises in the past few years.

Whistleblowing - Counting The Cost of Courage

South Africa’s reputation as an ethically dodgy and pervasively corrupt country is sadly becoming as much a part of our identity as our magnificent scenery, wonderful game parks and colourful people. And, as so often happens when something becomes this common place, we become desensitised to it. Our sense of disgust and moral outrage lessens with every story of corruption that emerges. We develop a shoulder-shrugging, “well, what do you expect?” attitude that makes even just the thought of ever eradicating corrupt practices from both our private and public sectors a seemingly unattainable pipe dream.
 

A Crisis or a Leadership Crisis?

Power, greed and pride – a toxic triumvirate driving decisions of bad leaders. Scratch the surface of a crisis and, predictably, individuals, groups or nations with toxic motives will be revealed. Typically, the origin of man-made crises is flawed leadership.