I often read the headlines that fill our local news sites and think that, from an overseas perspective, it can’t make pretty reading. I’ve also travelled to a few far off lands and, whilst this is of course a generalisation, unless someone has visited our shores they generally don’t have many good things to say.

Now I’m pretty sure the world is clued up on our reputation for dabbling in corruption (that 2010 World Cup bid as a benchmark), but it isn’t often you read a piece that lays it all as bare as this one from the LA Times. I’m going to pull some quotes from the beginning of that story but it really is worth a read in full:

The corruption habit begins early in South Africa, with children bribing school gate guards a few cents to let them out to buy candies…

[Lucky Menoe, an activist with a South African anticorruption organization, Corruption Watch] works with children who report their experience paying bribes at schools – to get a copy of an exam paper in advance, or to pass a subject. He runs programs to try to educate them to say no to requests for bribes…

The most common brush with corruption comes on roadsides where police, their badges artfully hidden, pull over drivers for minor offenses and demand a “cold drink” or to “buy me tea”…

…people have to pay bribes to hospital staff, school principals and teachers, housing authorities, and for permits, documents, licenses and contracts from government authorities.

Beyond bribes, corruption surfaces in the form of cronyism. That woman running the school snack shop? She’s the principal’s wife. The man called in to resurface a school playground? One of his pals…

Community health worker Cynthia Bushela, who joined Wednesday’s protest march, said it was impossible to get a job in a hospital because of corruption.

“If you want a job, they only take their families. They don’t take the right people. They take people with no qualifications,” she said.

“It’s everywhere – the government jobs, in the factories and companies. It’s everywhere in South Africa. Everywhere. You have to pay a bribe to get a job.”

Then out come a few stats that really don’t make for pretty reading, like a 2013 report that says 36% of South Africans admit to bribing a police officer in the past year. Perhaps more worryingly a higher percentage admit to bribing to acquire a ‘permit, license or other document’, and nearly a third had bribed a judge or magistrate.

One has to cringe when reading an article such as this but it’s hard to find fault with the reasoning – read it in full HERE.

[source:latimes]