Devi Pillay is a research fellow at GI ACE and a research associate at the Public Affairs Research Institute (PARI) in South Africa. She was previously a researcher and analyst for the Zondo Commission, and has worked extensively on corruption and state capture in South Africa.
In part one of this blog series, I explained how South Africa came to appoint a Commission of Inquiry into State Capture, known as the Zondo Commission after its Chairperson. Between 2018 and 2022, the Commission investigated corruption and state capture involving former President Jacob Zuma, the Gupta family, and many others. In part two, I discussed the nature and scope of the Commission’s work.
In this final part, I explore the Commission’s recommendations and the post-Zondo reform agenda in South Africa. I argue that the Commission produced important recommendations for policy reform, but that the legalistic nature of its inquiry prevented engagement with the deeper, structural drivers of corruption and state capture. I also discuss how the recommendations have affected the government’s anti-corruption platform. While there have been positive developments, these reforms are still heavily contested within the state and the political sphere, leading to uneven and incomplete implementation and persistent gaps in the reform agenda.
The Commission’s findings and recommendations
The previous blogs have analysed how the Commission conducted its investigations, how it defined ‘state capture’, and how it navigated complex challenges. The final product of this process was a six-part, 5000-page report handed over to the President in 2022, containing the Commission’s findings and recommendations for action.
Many of the findings are relatively narrow, detailing specific crimes and transgressions committed by public officials and their accomplices. Out of a total 353 recommendations issued by the Commission, 255 concerned the investigation, prosecution, and recovery of assets from individuals, groups, and companies. Amongst the implicated parties were some of the most powerful people in the country, including former president Zuma, senior politicians and government officials, and members of the Gupta family.
The other 100-odd recommendations concerned significant policy and legislative reforms based on evidence the Commission had collected about legal, regulatory, and institutional weaknesses that had allowed corruption to take root. This included 5 suggested Constitutional changes, 26 legislative changes, 64 operational or institutional reforms, and 3 proposals for new anti-corruption institutions.
The Commission recommended extensive changes to the procurement system to enhance its functionality, improve oversight and integrity measures, and to streamline South Africa’s complex and fragmented procurement system. To curb the power of patronage networks in appointing allies to key decision-making positions, the Commission proposed dramatic governance reforms for state-owned entities. Following strong criticism of Parliament’s failure to inquire into and prevent state capture, the Commission also recommended a number of changes to the way the legislature conducts oversight and accountability over the executive branch.
Some of the other key policy recommendations arising from the Commission include:
- the creation of new anti-corruption institutions;
- reviewing South Africa’s anti-money laundering regime;
- strengthening the independence and capability of the National Prosecuting Authority;
- the creation of new criminal offences; and
- measures to strengthen protections for whistle-blowers.
Due to the ambitious scope and challenging nature of the Commission’s investigations, there is a degree of unevenness in the final report. Some of the proposals are carefully crafted and backed by strong evidence, but others are relatively sketchy. There are also some crucial gaps where the Commission probably should have made recommendations but didn’t, or didn’t go far enough. Law enforcement reform, political financing, and professional enablers of corruption, for instance, were all largely overlooked, despite clear evidence of urgency.
The Commission’s recommendations have been largely technocratic, hoping to address corruption by improving the regulation and governance of state institutions. While there was some discussion of the fundamental, structural (political and economic) causes of systematic corruption and state capture, the Commission’s report did not meaningfully address them.
This is partly a consequence of the Commission’s method of inquiry – a judicial, courtroom-like investigation that excelled at uncovering evidence, but did not include other forms of social scientific inquiry, nor did it include a rigorous policy development process. The Commission’s structure, too, predisposed it to a legalistic approach – led by a judge, staffed by lawyers and forensic experts, and empowered by law to conduct investigations of a certain type. The Commission’s mandate, while broad in scope, was narrowly framed: to determine whether specific types of wrongdoing had occurred in state institutions, not necessarily to uncover and address the root causes of corruption and state capture.
While commissions of inquiry in South Africa are theoretically empowered to explore other methodologies, historically they have tended to reproduce these legalistic structures and practices and fall prey to the same weaknesses. In this case, there were some attempts to consider broader, structural questions – one chapter of the report, for example, makes some observations about the role of party politics in enabling Zuma’s network – but, ultimately, the Commission was not able to successfully integrate these discussions into its broader body of work and its recommendations.
The post-Zondo reform agenda
The Commission had a significant impact on South African politics. While some of the findings are being challenged by those who were criticised in the report, the fundamental conclusions of the Commission have been absorbed into the public discourse and state programming. Corruption and state capture have become incredibly salient issues in the political sphere, dominating political agendas and spurring broad mobilisation in civil society. The current government under President Ramaphosa frames itself as one of ‘renewal’, committed to rooting out corruption and repairing the damage done to state institutions by state capture. It has adopted much of the language and analysis of the Zondo Commission, and has committed itself (at least in principle) to the Commission’s broad vision of reform.
Following the conclusion of the Commission in 2022, President Cyril Ramaphosa committed to a wide range of reforms to address state capture, organised into an ambitious implementation plan. All recommendations concerning individual accountability for wrongdoing were referred to law enforcement agencies and the majority of these cases are under active investigation. Although these has been some progress in asset recovery, there have been no significant convictions to date, and criminal justice agencies are still struggling to overcome weak capacity, lack of operational independence, and the damage done by state capture.
Of the recommendations concerning wider reforms, not every recommendation made by the Commission was accepted. Most were supported by the President. Some recommendations – such as proposed changes to the electoral system or to the Constitution – were referred to other bodies for consideration. Some recommendations were folded into other reforms proposed by the government (for example, the overhaul of the procurement system or the broader project to professionalise the public administration). A handful of recommendations were rejected but substituted by a different course of action.
After three years, the government’s response to state capture has delivered mixed results. Some progress has been made in rebuilding certain institutions damaged by state capture (such as the revenue service) while others (the prosecuting authority and many state-owned entities) are still struggling to recover. Eight major pieces of legislation have been enacted or amended, including a new Public Procurement Act and a number of anti-money laundering reforms, and others are making their way through the legislature. However, it will be a long time before we will be able to evaluate their impact.
In other areas, there has been significant inertia. Much-needed reforms to the National Prosecuting Authority and whistleblower protection measures are still in limbo, as are many other commitments. Parliament has decided against adopting almost all of the proposed measures to improve oversight by the legislature, finding that it has sufficient powers and further intervention was unnecessary. Some policy proposals have attracted criticism and pushback from civil society, including a new model for governing state-owned entities that largely fails to engage with the issues raised by the Commission.
You can read a comprehensive review of the Commission’s recommendations, and the implementation of the government’s response plan, here.
The government’s anti-corruption reform package reproduces some of the weaknesses of the Commission itself. The obvious gaps in the Commission’s report, like law enforcement reform, have not been addressed. The deepening crisis in law enforcement has already led to the establishment of yet another commission of inquiry, this time into corruption in the criminal justice system.
As my co-author and I argue in a recent review for the Public Affairs Research Institute, a South African research organisation, the post-Zondo reforms have been halting and incomplete, making some positive progress but often stopping short of addressing the big structural issues that were revealed by the Commission. This is partially the result of complex, multifaceted dynamics playing out across state institutions: deep contestation between vested political and institutional interests, combined with the centre of government’s limited ability to coordinate reform across government. This also reflects a broader tendency of the Ramaphosa administration to focus on technocratic ‘good governance’ approaches, while failing to fully engage with the structural drivers of the deep-seated problems facing South Africa.
Reflecting and looking ahead
Ultimately, the Zondo Commission was an important moment for South Africa. It was imperfect and limited, and certainly not a magic bullet to solve corruption and state capture. But it conducted critical investigations, exposed powerful corrupt networks, and interrupted ongoing patterns of corruption deeply embedded in the state. It gathered an incredible archive of evidence about corruption as well as the institutional and regulatory weaknesses that enabled graft over the past two decades. The resulting reform agenda has been embraced by government and many non-state actors, and positive progress is being made in many areas.
The report remains a useful accountability tool for anti-corruption advocates. It is also a rich archive for researchers seeking to understand state capture and corruption over the past two decades. Going forward, anti-corruption advocates face two challenges. The first is to hold government to account for implementing and enforcing the Zondo reforms, many of which have been promised but left unfulfilled. The second is to fill in the gaps left by the Commission and to continue to push for an anti-corruption agenda that fully grapples with the causes of systemic corruption and state capture in South Africa.
This blog draws from the author’s experience as an analyst for the Zondo Commission and relates to GI ACE’s broader work on State Capture. Find out more about GI ACE’s research here.