- The Mirage of the “New Dawn”
It is 2026, eight years since the political transition that many hoped would end the systematic plunder of state resources. The “New Dawn” was proclaimed to a nation desperate for people-centred governance and ethical leadership. The reality has been a painful continuation of kleptocracy. We have moved not away from State Capture, but through it, from its centralised form under the Zuma administration into a period of fragmented, predatory looting that continues to ignore the plight of the ordinary person.
South Africa’s score on Transparency International’s 2024 Corruption Perceptions Index fell to 41 out of 100, its lowest since 2012 — dropping below the global average for the first time. This is not a statistical footnote. It is an indictment.
- The COVID-19 Looting: Stealing from the Destitute
The global pandemic served as a grim litmus test for the state’s character. Instead of protection, the public witnessed a feeding frenzy of historic proportions.
Funds earmarked for life-saving personal protective equipment were diverted into the hands of the politically connected, while frontline healthcare workers were left exposed and dying. The Digital Vibes scandal, in which then-Minister of Health Zweli Mkhize awarded a large COVID-19 communications tender to family members and associates, exemplified how the health crisis became a vehicle for personal enrichment.
As documented by Corruption Watch, the rot extended to the most basic level of human survival. Our investigations revealed the systematic misappropriation of food relief parcels, where local officials hijacked aid meant for the starving, redirecting it for political leverage or private resale. This was not merely administrative theft. It was a lethal betrayal of the social contract.
3. Institutional Rot
The criminal justice system faces a legitimacy crisis with deep historical roots.
The capture of law enforcement is not new. The conviction of former National Police Commissioner Jackie Selebi, found to have accepted bribes from organised crime figure Glenn Agliotti, demonstrated that the guardians of the law were themselves for sale. That precedent was never decisively broken.
More recently, in 2025, Police Commissioner Nhlanhla Mkhwanazi made accusations that high-ranking police officials, politicians, and members of the judiciary had colluded with criminal syndicates and obstructed justice. The pattern endures.
The failure to provide full accountability for the killing of Andries Tatane in Ficksburg, and for the Marikana Massacre, remains a stain on our constitutional democracy. When the state kills its own citizens in defence of corporate and political interests, and then shields perpetrators from meaningful accountability, the foundations of the Constitution begin to crack.
4. Corruption at the Roots: Who Suffers Most
Corruption in South Africa is not an abstraction. It strikes at the foundations of daily life — and it strikes hardest at those with the least power to fight back.
Corruption Watch has highlighted the harrowing exploitation of farmworkers, a community already doubly marginalised by the legacies of colonialism and apartheid. Even when state resources are expressly allocated for their upliftment, administrators and politicians, frequently acting in concert with corporate interests, have worked to undermine those efforts. Resources intended for land reform and worker empowerment are routinely siphoned off, ensuring that wealth concentrates upward while the vulnerable remain trapped in cycles of abuse and poverty.
As Edward Kieswetter, SARS Commissioner and inaugural recipient of the Kathy Award for ethical leadership, has observed: “Corruption is not only a government phenomenon. It is a societal phenomenon.” The private sector, as demonstrated by the arms deal, the Bosasa scandal, and the McKinsey and Bain & Company engagements, has been an active participant, not merely a passive victim.
5. The Just Energy Transition: The Next Frontier for Capture?
The decommissioning of the Komati power station in Mpumalanga has been presented as a “learning moment” in South Africa’s transition away from coal. The aspiration is legitimate and urgent. But the execution demands the most vigilant scrutiny. Addressing climate change is a moral imperative, yet when the closure of a power station results in the destruction of local livelihoods without credible alternatives, we must ask a hard question: whose transition is this, and who stands to profit from it?
The “Just Energy Transition” must not become the next frontier for corporate and political capture. The billions in international financing attached to this process require transparency mechanisms at least as robust as those we are still building for the Zondo Commission’s findings. Whistleblowers in this space must be protected before they are silenced, not mourned afterwards.
6. The Martyrdom of Whistleblowers
South Africa continues to witness the victimisation and murder of those who expose corruption.
Babita Deokaran was assassinated in August 2021 outside her Johannesburg home. She had been a key witness regarding the fraudulent R850 million Tembisa Hospital tender and had played a central role in identifying COVID-19 PPE irregularities. Her killers were convicted, but the masterminds, the political and financial beneficiaries who ordered her death, have not all faced justice.
In 2023, two court-appointed liquidators tracing Bosasa’s finances were shot dead in suspected assassinations directly linked to their investigative work.
Investigator Charl Kinnear was murdered in 2020, a killing connected to a rogue unit within the Western Cape Crime Intelligence Division.
The pattern is consistent and deliberate: expose the rot, and the system, or those who profit from it, will make you pay. We have built a culture of “exposing” corruption. We have not yet built a culture of protecting those who do the exposing, nor of consistently holding to account those at the top of the networks they uncover.
The Special Investigating Unit has reported that the more publicly it communicates the outcomes of investigations, the more whistleblowers come forward. Transparency breeds courage. This is the virtuous cycle that must be deliberately cultivated and institutionally protected.
7. What Has Been Won: Reasons Not to Surrender to Despair
It would be dishonest, and strategically self-defeating, to acknowledge only the failures. The anti-corruption struggle has recorded genuine, hard-won gains.
- The Zondo Commission produced one of the most detailed public records of high-level corruption in democratic South Africa’s history. Its findings provided a legal and evidentiary foundation for ongoing prosecutions.
- The NPA Amendment Bill (tabled in 2023) established the Investigating Directorate Against Corruption as a permanent, prosecution-led investigative unit with independent powers of arrest and seizure. This is structural reform.
- Over 1,300 corruption-related convictions have been secured by Specialised Commercial Crimes Courts, including more than 500 government officials.
- The SIU’s Special Tribunal delivered 100 judgments between 2019 and 2024, recovering R2.28 billion and freezing a further R14.18 billion in assets.
- The SARS recovery, from a captured institution to a credible revenue authority, demonstrates that institutional restoration is possible.
- In 2025, South Africa proposed legislation to establish a standalone, independent Anti-Corruption Commission as a Chapter 9 institution. The legislative path remains contested, but the ambition is significant.
- McKinsey’s $122 million settlement (December 2024) showed that international legal mechanisms can reach where domestic enforcement has failed.
These wins are real. They are also insufficient. Thousands of perpetrators have not been prosecuted. Many remain in positions of power. The structural conditions that enable corruption, patronage networks, underfunded oversight institutions, inadequate whistleblower protections, slow courts, remain largely intact.
8. Guided by the Legacy of Ahmed Kathrada
As we reflect on where we stand in 2026, it is fitting that we are guided by the life and words of Ahmed Kathrada, Robben Island prisoner, parliamentarian, and one of the moral compasses of post-apartheid South Africa.
Kathrada himself once observed: “If prisoners from different parties on Robben Island could unite against the common enemy, today why can’t we unite against this common enemy which is poverty, hunger, disease?”
To that list, we must add corruption, the disease that makes all other diseases worse.
The Ahmed Kathrada Foundation has rightly described the challenge in these terms: “Where vestiges of corruption remain or wherever it raises its ugly head afresh, let us forge a culture of absolutely zero tolerance. It is going to take every one of us to rebuild our country, to realise the aspirations and dreams of our Constitution.”
Kathrada’s defining quality, described by those who knew him best, was that he never felt entitled. He joined the struggle not for positions, not for material reward, but for a South Africa worthy of its people. He demanded the same from those who came after him.
9. Conclusion
Action against corruption must be swift, consistent, and indiscriminate in its reach. It is no longer acceptable to confine our ambitions to the prosecution of low-ranking clerks while accounting officers and political principals remain shielded by party loyalty and factional patronage just as we noted when politicians voted against accountability when handling the Phala Phala criminal and corruption scandal. The commissions, task teams and panels give us the names and the evidence. The question before us in 2026 is one of institutional courage and political will.
Corruption is not only a governmental failure. It is a societal one. The private sector that paid the bribes, the professionals who structured the transactions, the communities that looked away, all bear a share of responsibility. The antidote is not despair. It is organised, sustained, citizen-driven accountability.
In the words attributed to those who carry Kathrada’s legacy: hope is not naïve, it is the stubborn belief that justice can still win if enough of us dare to defend it.
The struggle is the same. The stakes are higher. We must not yield.
