POLITICAL CORRUPTION IN SOUTH-AFRICA

Public opinion suggests that political corruption is entrenched in Sou th Africa. Comparative experience does not indicate that the historica l South African political environment was especially likely to nurture a venal bureaucracy; as a fairly industrialized and extremely coerciv e state the apartheid order may have been less susceptible to many of the forms of political corruption analysts have associated with other post-colonial developing countries. Democratization has made governmen t less secret, inhibiting corruption in certain domains but through ex tending government's activities opening up possibilities for abuse in others. Today's authorities argue that the present extent of corruptio n is largely inherited and indeed certain government departments, nota bly those concerned with security and the homelands, as well as the au tonomous homeland administrations themselves, had a history of routine official misbehaviour. After describing the distribution and nature o f corruption in South African public administration this article concl udes that a substantial proportion of modem corruption occurs in regio nal administrations and certainly embodies a legacy from the homeland civil services. A major source of financial misappropriation in the ol d central government, secret defence procurement, no longer exists but corruption is stimulated by new official practices and fresh demands imposed upon the bureaucracy including discriminatory tendering, polit ical solidarity, and the expansion of citizen entitlements. Though muc h contemporary corruption is inherited from the past, the simultaneous democratization and restructuring of the South African state makes it very vulnerable to new forms of abuse in different locations.