South Africa has some excellent institutions, such as the National Treasury, the competition authorities, the JSE and the justice system, that comply with the law and adhere to the highest governance standards, says David Lewis, but there are too few of them.
Students, officials in the higher education department, and those in the National Student Financial Aid Scheme have all acknowledged that corruption has played a role in the current university fees crisis.
The South African Municipal Workers Union is still looking for its missing millions – but more arrests have been made, after the arrest earlier this year of a consultant to the union. Almost R180-million is missing from the union’s coffers, and suspicions are pointing to officials from within the organisation.
Released yesterday, Corruption Watch’s new schools report highlights the main areas of corruption in schools, the key players in schools corruption and the heroic work of whistleblowers, and makes some recommendations on how to mitigate this corruption.
Corruption Watch’s new schools report reveals that 54% of corruption cases reported to us implicate principals as the primary culprits, with collusion between, among others, members of school governing bodies, teachers, family members and other outside parties involved in contractual arrangements with schools.
For the police to be able to do their work efficiently and effectively they must be depoliticised, says our board member Vusi Pikoli, currently the Western Cape police ombud. He was delivering the keynote speech at the 6th Institute for Security Studies international conference last week.
National Good Governance Week 2015 runs from 19-23 October, under the theme “20 years of protecting public: success, challenges and the road ahead”. The campaign aims to promote good governance and integrity in all state affairs, and raise awareness and encourage dialogue on governance among the executive, legislatures, government officials and civil society.
The right to privacy is not implicated by disclosure of party funding, writes legal researcher Matthew Kruger. At most, it is minimally implicated, because the funding of a political party is by nature a public act. If it is to be truly political in the way that it purports to be, the act of funding must be disclosed.
For knowing all along he was guilty but refusing to do the right thing by stepping down, and for not adhering to its own election manifesto by acting against members found guilty of corruption, Northern Cape finance MEC John Block and the ANC are our zeroes for the week.