An elected public representative is expected to stay true to their mandate of working in the best interest of the public at all times, or be willing to step down to make way for others who can. This rings true for a ward councillor with a constituency of a few thousand people, or the sitting president of the country. What is in the public interest is top priority and should remain so until the particular office is vacated.
Parliamentary speaker Baleka Mbete, in her thinking around the secret ballot of no confidence in President Jacob Zuma – announced yesterday – recognises the primary point made by the Constitutional Court: that once an MP is sworn in, his or her allegiance is not first and foremost to their party but to the Constitution and the oath of office.
The City of Johannesburg’s corruption fighters have uncovered graft totalling up to R12-billion‚ The Star newspaper reported on Thursday.
In July 2017, Corruption Watch and the Institute for Security Studies launched a joint public awareness campaign that focuses on the appointments of the SAPS national commissioner and the head of the Directorate for Priority Crime Investigations (the Hawks).
It’s time to change the way we talk and think about Africa, writes Nick Dearden. The continent is not poor, but looting, illicit financial flows, dodged taxes, illegal wildlife trade, wealth in the hands of a few, and other unasked-for costs are robbing it of its future. There is money coming into Africa, but more is leaving it.
Corruption has reached deep into communities around the country, said SACC general secretary Bishop Malusi Mpumlwana, and people did not see the need to become educated because there were other ways to make money. Mpumlwana and Prof Ivor Chipkin of Wits University were making submissions before Parliament’s portfolio committee of public enterprises, as part of the committee’s preparation for its inquiry into the affairs of Eskom and other state-owned entities, and state capture.
If South Africa is to recover, then the country’s badly frayed socio-economic fabric will need to be restitched, not just patched, writes Sean Gossel. Reversing the effects of state decay on the poor will take short-run and long-run interventions. Short-run measures will need to include holding public officials to account, reforming state owned enterprises and reversing the numerous institutional weaknesses at all levels of government, while long-term interventions must involve both public and private stakeholders.
Two Gauteng Community Safety Department officials are due to appear in the Johannesburg Commercial Court on Monday on charges of corruption
As of April 2017, the level of country compliance with the FATF 40 recommendations rests at just 25% across the 30 countries most recently assessed. While this is definitely an improvement since 2011, when full compliance across 160 countries was at 12.3%, taking 27 years since the standards were introduced to get to a 25% compliance level cannot exactly be called rapid progress.