EDITORIAL | It’s everywhere, but we must never forget how disgusting corruption is

“The latest corruption scandal to hit SA” has become a cliché of the highest order.

By the time this editorial appears, the case in point might already have been eclipsed by another disgrace.

On Monday, however, “the latest corruption scandal to hit SA” involved theft of tens of millions of rand — the exact amount is still to be determined — that was diverted from its purpose of buying vital emergency-services equipment and directed into the personal wealth-creation projects of several members of the SA Police Service (SAPS) and their collaborators.

More than a dozen accused, among them some senior police officers, have been charged with corruption, fraud, theft and money-laundering.

While it might be of some small comfort to citizens that recent corruption cases are publicised in the wake of swift investigations and prompt arrests, our constant exposure to corruption seems to have robbed the word of its power to shock.

In terms of our perceptions, fraud, theft and money-laundering remain as bad as they always have been. No one wants those evils associated with their names. 

Corruption, however, has become a benign sort of catchphrase that covers anything from taking home a couple of extra ballpoint pens from the office to buying yourself a luxury car with money that was supposed to be spent on a state ambulance.

It is unlikely anyone will forfeit their life because of a few purloined pens. In other cases, however, corrupt individuals, because of where the money they stole was supposed to go, might also be accessories to murder.

These crimes may seem very different in scale, but corruption (the word) does not change its meaning according to the wrongdoing it describes. 

Corruption comes from a Latin root meaning to spoil or destroy. In English, corruption originally referred to the rotting of a carcass, with all the flies and putridity and bad-smelling gases that accompanied such decay.

Later, it became associated with the degradation of morals, which is understandable, because the rotting of a corpse being slowly consumed by bacteria, mould and maggots made a handy visceral metaphor for the decay of innocence and purity.

Corruption spread, as rot does, and began also to apply to words and phrases used in a way not traditionally accepted in a language. In this way, corruption itself became corrupted. It put on some deodorant, lost its stench and we got used to seeing it as an anodyne, everyday word.

There might be a case for differentiating between what some might call “petty corruption”, where employees cheat on their leave balances or help a friend get a job in their organisation, and the full-blown, Zondo-commission sort of corruption, where billions are funnelled away from relief for the poor to swell the already corpulent bank balances and waistlines of the rich.

This is not a call for some sort of broken-window, zero-tolerance approach to legislation in SA. We need to hang those rotten big fish out to dry before the pen-stealing shrimp are scolded (or scalded). And it is not necessarily true that pen-stealing is a gateway crime that will lead the perpetrators to commit fraud on a gargantuan scale.

Maybe what we need is a new word to describe the grand larceny of the Gupterati and their ilk. 

Either that or we need to retrain ourselves in how to react to corruption in different contexts.

No matter how frequently we hear and see “the latest corruption scandal”, we should never forget the putridity that oozes from every crevice of the word. When it comes to public servants robbing from the people they have sworn to serve and protect, we should be as appalled, outraged and disgusted as if we’d just stepped knee deep into a sewer full of rotting rat cadavers.