Sunday Times (Johannesburg) - July 16, 2006
Brendan Boyle

CORRUPTION - in the public and private sectors - has been identified as an acute problem facing democratic South Africa.

This is contained in a comprehensive, but sanitised, self-assessment report submitted to the African Peer Review Mechanism (APRM) team that arrived this week to evaluate the country's progress against African Union targets.

The document, of which the Sunday Times has a copy, is bluntly critical of the government's record in the fight against HIV/Aids, but is largely silent on the violent crime that has stirred the Safety and Security ministry into emergency action over the past month.

Public and private-sector corruption is also identified as an acute problem and crime is addressed in sections dealing with the rights of women, children and vulnerable groups. The only reference to more general violent crime is as an impediment to growth and investment.

Though most specific references to past scandals were removed from the final version, the report cites action over abuses of travel vouchers and against former Deputy President Jacob Zuma as evidence of a commitment to clean government.

It reflects the strong criticism heard during nearly a year of public hearings and technical workshops of the government's commitment to effective public consultation, but makes no fundamentally original proposals on how to give the people a better voice.

The report was handed to the head of the APRM Country Review Team, Nigerian professor of economics Adebayo Adedeji, in Tshwane this week, but will not be released to the public for several months.

The final report is a substantially rewritten version of the draft adopted by around 1700 delegates to the second national APRM consultative conference in Kliptown in May, but the editors have not been publicly identified. Clayson Monyela, spokesman for Public Service and Administration Minister Geraldine Fraser-Moleketi, who managed the self-assessment process, said two "experts" had been engaged.

The final version was approved by the Cabinet and by a National General Council (NGC) of government and civil society delegates.

"The report handed out this week shows substantial alteration from the report discussed in Kliptown and, as a result, a substantial amount of the texture of the debates has been lost," said Paul Graham, executive director of the Institute for Democracy, Idasa.

Idasa was one of four technical partners appointed to condense thousands of pages of reports and submissions into a manageable draft.

Hassen Lorgat of the South African National NGO Coalition, who is a member of the NGC, said he was broadly satisfied with the report.

"You could argue that government has had too much say, sometimes trying to be civil society itself, but I don't think we have completely lost anything from the report," he said.

Almost all the issues raised in workshops and public meetings appear to get at least a phrase in the final report, but some, which took up hours of discussion and reflected strong criticism of government, have been significantly edited.

Long debates about floor-crossing and the lack of disclosure about private funding of political parties were reduced to a few words each.

Alison Tilley of the Open Democracy Advice Centre said she was pleased that submissions about ineffective access to information and inadequate protection for whistleblowers who expose corruption were mentioned in the report, "but we were disappointed that there is nothing about strengthened protection for whistle-blowers in the programme of action".

The assessment condenses South Africa's challenges to four key themes: poverty, unemployment, underdevelopment and HIV/Aids.

Remedial measures are proposed under the four themes of the APRM inquiry - democracy and good political governance, economic governance and management, corporate governance and socioeconomic development.

"Submissions indicated that the response from the South African government to the HIV and Aids pandemic must be clearer," the report says.

The draft programme of action proposes that the National Aids Council now headed by Deputy President Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka should appoint a multi-sectoral commission to draft a nationally agreed five-year strategic plan "with clear implementation recommendations in place".

References to the controversy over proposals to give the government greater control over the management of judges and the courts were excised from the final report, but it does call for "a comprehensive review of the entire criminal justice system".

Ghana and Rwanda have completed peer reviews, and similar processes are under way in the 26 countries that have signed up to the APRM.

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