The Big Read: South Africa is in the grips of a very serious corruption crisis that might very well undermine the fabric of the state and compromise our ability to rectify the socioeconomic wrongs of our marred past.

The shocking revelation in the Public Service Commission's latest report, that 7529 cases of suspected corruption had been reported to the government's anti-corruption hotline, follows a well-established pattern of shocking revelations of unethical conduct and concerns expressed by the PSC every year that are hardly ever acted on by the government.

The announcement by Public Service Minister Richard Baloyi of a new investigative unit to speed up disciplinary hearings and finalise cases will mark yet another small-scale response when much bolder action and clear leadership is required to remove what Judge Hillary Squires, during the Shaik trial, aptly called a cancer in our society - immortal words that have yet again been repeated during the Selebi case.

The objective of running a clean administration during the Zuma era has been revealed to be a pipe dream.

With newly minted resolutions flowing from the ANC's national general council on leadership and organisational renewal, the battle has at least begun at the level of rhetorical flourishes, but eliminating institutionalised corruption will require much more than fine-sounding party resolutions or trade-union-sponsored anti-corruption bodies.

It requires real leadership and a high-level, state-led offensive to counteract the bold undercurrents of self-enrichment and moral drift we witness in the headlines every day.

Institutionalised corruption is compounded by a dramatic new tolerance for the repeated qualified audits being issued to government departments, and a seemingly lax attitude to the strict provisions and financial controls that were entrenched by early parliaments when the Public Finance Management Act was created and the imposition of Treasury control was a feared reality for public budgeting repeat offenders.

The moral drift we see in the sheer scale of corruption in our society appears to be mirrored in a drift in the rigour with which public funds are accounted for - a very grave and serious trend if it is not rapidly reversed.

As if the various egregious examples of self-enrichment and outright corruption were not enough, the tight controls that used to define the provisions of the Public Finance Management Act are about to be significantly undermined by new legislation.

As the chairman of parliament's standing committee on public accounts has rightly remarked, the new draft Unauthorised Expenditure Authorisation Bill will open the floodgates of corruption if provincial legislatures get the green light to simply condone expenditure that falls foul of the provisions of the Public Finance Management Act.

When the act was created, it specified three specific sets of expenditure that required vigorous investigation by the auditor-general and by parliamentary public accounts bodies at national and provincial level: unauthorised, fruitless and wasteful expenditure.

These categories were specified so that elected officials could determine, after interrogating the relevant public servants, whether the legislature should explicitly condone some of these categories of expenditure.

It is clear that the provisions of the new bill constitute a significant threat to these carefully crafted checks and balances, and that they will simply aid and abet the moral drift that has set in.

South Africa is facing a corruption crisis to which any legislative steps that undermine the Public Finance Management Act will contribute.

We have to ask ourselves how we got here.

We have to ask what combination of lax leadership and populist politics brought us to this moment.

Perhaps it is worthwhile to recall that it is populism and crude electoral politics that have led us to this moment of societal danger - a moment at which a trade union leader (in an effort to redeem his own prior populist complicity) tries to step in to craft a corruption unit; a moment at which the costs of disbanding the Scorpions becomes clearer every day.

Though Cosatu's Zwelinzima Vavi - who might yet face ANC disciplinary sanctions - has emerged as the most crucial voice on corruption, it is worth reminding ourselves that this is the very same leader who played a part in the opportunistic killing off of the Scorpions, whatever the merit of his new crusade.

South Africa's first democratic parliament took great pains to craft the Public Finance Management Act and to set up clear systems for public accounts committees across the country.

Our second democratic parliament painstakingly crafted legislation that created the now defunct Scorpions to act as a bulwark against the institutionalisation of corruption, knowing full-well how corrosive such institutionalisation would be to the realisation of the dream of a better life for all.

The third "rubber-stamp" parliament paid lip-service to public participation and ensured that the unseemly and predetermined demise of the elite prosecutions-led crime-fighting unit.

Due to the relentless efforts of a single courageous citizen, Bob Glenister, we will hear later this year what the Constitutional Court thinks of this charade.

But, under our fourth democratic parliament, we are witnessing an unprecedented increase in corruption within a moribund institution, despite its catch phrase about wanting to be an "activist parliament".

South Africa can ill afford this moral drift, the institutionalisation of corruption and the tolerance of unaccountability in the spending of public funds.

It is time for our elected representatives to show that they take the concerns of their society seriously.