By Wesley Seale
Every morning while waking up for the past 11 days, the realisation that South African taxpayers are paying for my stay has made me appreciate the conditions and circumstances, even if they are sacrifices.
After being stuck in Beijing for more than four months, at the end of July a number of students who had had the rare privilege of studying in China landed at OR Tambo International Airport. Our group, in particular, had been funded by Chinese and South African taxpayers.
Missing my family in Cape Town terribly, we are enduring the mandatory quarantine period while not being able to leave our rooms. The conditions are strict. Yet for the accommodation and three meals a day, again all funded by taxpayers, this is a small price to pay.
The silence and the time alone have once again allowed for a time of reflection of what is happening in South Africa. The disturbance in normal life that Covid-19 has caused has been described before as a moment of liminality.
Moments of liminality are periods of transition, ambiguity or disorientation. A threshold, as it were, the moment causes, usually, an extreme reaction of the characteristics of a society. The good and the bad of a society are in stark sight.
While unemployment, poverty and inequality have become a rhetorical description of South Africa, Covid-19 has displayed the vast inequalities, in particular, that exist within our towns and cities.
Those who are politically connected, whether in business or in the public service, find it acceptable to engage in corrupt transactions precisely because they, and not the poor, have access to these opportunities.
Yet a major challenge with corruption in South Africa is our understanding of corruption and what we view as the cure. We believe that law enforcement is the silver bullet when it is not. In fact, law enforcement is part of the problem.
In a seminal essay on corruption written in 1969, James C Scott notes that often societies, especially in Africa and Asia, approach and view corruption through a Western lens when the nature of the beast is very different in these parts of the world.
Instead, in the developing world, corruption usually takes place not in the legislative process, but in the implementation phase. In other words, in the enforcement stage.
South Africa cannot put its trust in the Special Investigative Unit (SIU), the Hawks, the SAPS or even the NPA to bring corrupt officials to book.
Given the nature of corruption in our part of the world, these remain part of the problem. Forced to watch continuous, sensationalist media reports during these quarantine days, we see academics interviewed pointing fingers at the government for being corrupt and failing to come up with the answers, when in actual fact it is academics themselves who should be providing answers.
If only academics realise that they, too, are living off taxpayers’ money and reflect better on corruption in the context of our deep inequalities as a country.
Seale taught politics at UWC and Rhodes University. He has just completed his PhD in Beijing.