Global Integrity Report: South Africa - 2010

This peer-reviewed country report includes:

Integrity Indicators Scorecard: Scores, scoring criteria, commentary, references, and peer review perspectives for more than 300 Integrity Indicators.

Reporter's Notebook: An on-the-ground look at corruption and integrity from a leading local journalist.

Corruption Timeline: Ten years of political context to today's corruption and integrity issues.

HIGHLIghts

South Africa’s performance in the 2010 Report is generally flat, demonstrating no discernible upward or downward trends since Global Integrity’s last assessment of the country in 2008. The civil service continues to exhibit vulnerabilities in its human resource management practices, including hiring and bonus payments. Law enforcement also faces problems that threaten to undermine its professionalism, such as discrimination and favoritism in its employment selection and promotion processes as well as threats of political interference. South Africa fares particularly poorly when it comes to the transparency of private donations to political parties and candidates, with no financial disclosure requirements in place. One area, however, that has seen a marked improvement is the judiciary; in particular, the passage of a new legal requirement for judges to disclose their financial interests as well as provisional regulatory guidelines for the acceptance of any gifts. Anti-corruption civil society organizations continue to play a dynamic role in their watchdog capacities although it is normally the better funded and more organized CSOs that can successfully play this role.

From the Reporter's Notebook: At the end of June 2010, the Argus published an account, based on an affidavit by its political reporter Ashley Smith, in which he admitted that during 2005, he and then-political editor Joseph Aranes were secretly paid to boost the political fortunes of Ebrahim Rasool, the Western Cape premier at the time. Both Rasool and Aranes denied the allegations, but Smith’s statement was seized on by South African Communist Party (SACP) General-secretary Blade Nzimande – who also serves as minister of higher education – to launch what has emerged as a sustained attack on the media.