Combatting corruption in Southern Africa : an examination of anti-corruption agencies in Botswana, South Africa and Namibia

Abstract

This thesis examines the work of anti-corruption agencies in Botswana, South Africa and Namibia. It argues that these agencies have produced disappointing results in terms of investigating and prosecuting high-level corruption. It suggests five main reasons for this failure. First, anti-corruption agencies have suffered from a lack of resources resulting from lack of political support and the general problem of economic underdevelopment. Second, there is a lack of political will' to prosecute high-level corruption. Third, even if there was such a will, anticorruption agencies, by their very. nature, are unable to affect the underlying political pressures which promote corruption and, therefore, their successes need to be limited to individual cases. Fourth, the model on which such agencies have been based is inappropriate to the African setting and assumes conditions that cannot be replicated in the subcontinent. And finally, these factors suggest that the purpose of anti-corruption agencies in Africa might possibly have more to do with reassuring investors and aid donors in an age of globalisation. than with actually attacking high-level corruption, an activity that would, after all, undermine the fragile political elites of these countries. The dissertation first evaluates the destructive character of corruption in Africa and attempts to control it through anti-corruption reform. It then proceeds to an analysis of the problem, and the agencies set up to deal with it, in each of the three country cases. The dissertation concludes with a comparison of the effectiveness of the anti-corruption agencies in the three countries