More Laws Won’t Stop Corruption
Elections remain the most effective accountability tool
South Africa has been talking about accountability for far longer than the democratic era. The Madlanga Commission and the parliamentary Ad Hoc Committee to Investigate Allegations made by Lieutenant General Nhlanhla Mkhwanazi may once again place the issue at centre stage, but the national lament about corruption is hardly new. From Nkandla to Bosasa to Eskom - and long before that, from Cecil John Rhodes to Paul Kruger - each generation of South Africans seems convinced its moment is uniquely rotten. South Africans consistently believe the present is corrupt and the past was pristine. The past, of course, never was.
The real question is therefore not whether corruption exists (it always has) but whether we understand what actually curbs it and how to get rid of it.
What causes corruption?
Last week I attended a SALGA conference where representatives from various local governments, academia and non-profit organisations discussed new approaches to the legacy problems facing municipalities. Accountability rightly dominated many of the discussions. Local government across much of the country is visibly collapsing, and corruption is undeniably central to that failure.
The reflexive proposed solutions to corruption, however, remains predictable: more rules, more laws, more regulations. The national response to municipalities failing is to for example broaden the Public Service Commission’s mandate, introduce new procurement frameworks, or rebrand coordination and oversight through initiatives like the DDM. Add more policies as if corruption is simply the result of insufficient paperwork.
Yet South Africa does not suffer from a shortage of rules. This is best illustrated at local government level. Local governments have no less than 250 odd pieces of legislation that govern their workings. This heap of legislative paperwork has not stopped rampant corruption at municipal level. South Africa clearly suffers from a shortage of implementation and, above all, a shortage of consequences, not rules.
This fixation on regulatory and legislative overproduction reflects what I have come to call our policy romanticism: the belief that sophisticated plans on paper can substitute for effective enforcement in reality. Hermann Pretorius has argued persuasively that it is often precisely the proliferation of regulation that incubates corruption. The more procedural choke points inserted between citizens and service delivery or between entrepreneurs and lawful economic activity the more opportunities arise for bribery, rent-seeking, and political gatekeeping. Complexity is corruption’s currency.
In this sense, our instinct to fight corruption with ever more rules or laws frequently achieves the opposite.
But this impulse to respond to failure with ever more laws and regulations does not come from the electorate, it comes from the bureaucracy itself. Officials and policy technocrats, confronted daily with collapsing systems and weak enforcement capacity, reach instinctively for the tools they have available: drafting rules, frameworks, strategies, and compliance layers. Their power is administrative, not electoral, so their lever is rule-making. In that sense, the proliferation of regulation is understandable as an attempt to “do something” within the confines of bureaucratic authority. It would be misplaced to simply assign blame here. The bureaucracy is reacting to dysfunction using the only instruments it controls.
But this is precisely where the structural disconnect arises. Rules do not substitute for accountability, and bureaucratic fixes cannot replicate democratic discipline. In contrast, the electorate’s lever is not regulation but elections and the ability to remove failing leaders altogether. Yet our public conversation increasingly treats corruption as a technical governance or structural problem rather than a political one,. This is even more so now that the performance of accountability is increasing even though we don’t have much to show for it.
On this score it must be said that electoral accountability does not discipline bureaucrats directly but it disciplines the political leadership that controls the environment in which bureaucrats operate. When electoral competition is real, politicians suddenly have an incentive to professionalise appointments, enforce consequence management, insist on transparent procurement processes, and support internal disciplinary mechanisms that would otherwise be politically inconvenient. Municipal managers are removed instead of recycled, officials are suspended rather than quietly redeployed, and supply-chain irregularities are escalated rather than buried. Electoral vulnerability sharpens the political will to assert oversight over administration and this political will is the difference between rules that exist only on paper and systems that function in practice.
It is true that bureaucratic corruption often survives political transitions. But elections remain the only force capable of breaking that insulation. The contrasting experiences of reformist and stagnant municipalities demonstrate that institutional rot is not immutable, it persists primarily where political leadership lacks either the courage or the incentive to confront it.
Basic accountability
When talking about plans to address corruption we obsess over elaborate solutions to the hardest 20 per cent of the problem, while neglecting the simplest tool that addresses the remaining 80 per cent. There is a tendency to concentrate reform efforts on complex policy interventions while neglecting foundational accountability mechanisms. Our policy discourse devotes outsized energy to designing ever more sophisticated regulatory architectures while underestimating the potency of basic democratic discipline. The fact remains that the most effective and basic accountability mechanism is elections.
Basic democratic accountability remains the most powerful anti-corruption mechanism any society possesses. Officials who govern badly or corruptly should be voted out. No commission, amendment, procurement regulation or strategy document ever approaches the disciplining power of electoral consequences.
And whatever its flaws, South Africa’s democracy remains functional. The dire predictions of a “nag van die lang messe” following the ANC’s electoral decline did not materialise in 2024 as many of the early 00s doomsdayers predicted. Political power is no longer largely monopolised by a single party. And although coalitions are messy and South Africa has had to navigate the arrival of coalition politics and governance, ultimately this signals a maturing of our electoral system. Our democracy still provides citizens with the ultimate lever of accountability.
And this type of accountability in South Africa it is demonstrably possible. Where political competition has had real consequences standards have improved. The Western Cape and various local governments in the province provides the clearest example: successive clean audits, stable infrastructure delivery, consistently better service outcomes, and lower levels of maladministration have coincided with uninterrupted DA governance. At a local level municipalities like Cape Town and uMngeni show how institutional stability combined with political incentives can translate into competent administration. These cases confirm the basic democratic truth that when voters reward performance and punish failure, parties adapt or are replaced. And the DA does not take this for granted.
The DA and its coalition partners operate under continuous electoral pressure. They cannot rely on historic loyalty to excuse dysfunction. For the DA and its coalition partners, good governance is not merely an ethical preference, it is a matter of electoral survival. Clean audits, functioning procurement systems, and visible service delivery are not PR luxuries but political necessities.
No party in South Africa is subjected to the level of scrutiny faced by the DA. Every procurement misstep, service outage, or internal administrative failure is interrogated intensely by opposition parties, civil society, national government, and major media outlets often with a ferocity unmatched elsewhere in the political system. Even the hint of lapse involving a DA politician is treated as morally equivalent or at the same level of scrutiny to the large-scale, systemic corruption that has wholly characterised ANC governance over the past two decades.
This relentless oversight creates a political culture in which systems are constantly stress-tested, deviations corrected quickly, and incompetence is far more likely to trigger consequence management rather than quiet redeployment elsewhere. But in the long run this benefits the DA by institutionalising competence as an electoral asset.
And despite what many of the commentariat suggest, the DA still retains the confidence of the electorate there where it governs.
Accountability is not produced by layered regulations or moral exhortation, but by the incentives created when political power is genuinely contestable. Where that incentive exists, clean governance follows.
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The following quote:"And although coalitions are messy and South Africa has had to navigate the arrival of coalition politics and governance, ultimately this signals a maturing of our electoral system"
I see it not neccessarily as maturing, but rather, a clear sign that our political system is tilting (thanks to the ANC) even more, towards a patronage system, where rewards (positions or other rewards) buy loyalty and principles are not the driving decision-making force.