Government and the private sector must rise above strategising and planning and start to soil their hands in the fight against corruption, Public Service and Administration Minister Richard Baloyi said on Friday at the third Business Unity South Africa (Busa) anticorruption forum in Sandton.

He said there was no need for further corruption-fighting strategies or new legislation to be introduced, but that the time had come to confront the environment in which corruption flourished.

“We need to deal with the arrogance of certain rich people, who take advantage of and corrupt unsuspecting and innocent citizens,” he told the conference.

“I intend to amend the Public Service Act in an effort to deal swiftly and decisively with any public official suspected of corruption. I want to do away with the practice of suspending such officials with full pay,” he assured delegates.

Baloyi intends to implement a strategy of taking swift action with minimal financial implications – firing corrupt officials.

Busa president Futhi Mtoba said that a collaborative and sustained process of cooperation among stakeholders was needed. This would increase the impact of credibility of individual action, bringing vulnerable individual players into an alliance of like-minded organisations and would level the playing field between competitors.

“Collective action could complement or temporarily substitute for and strengthen weak local laws and anticorruption practices,” she said.

Mtoba said the time had come for transaction-based agreements, such as integrity pacts that seek to ensure that individual transactions are free of corruption. “A perfect example to demonstrate this could be the upcoming big procurement projects in the South African transport sector, where we can use integrity pacts to demonstrate best practice,” she said.

Professional services firm PricewaterhouseCoopers partner and director Peter Goss added that although there were numerous entities all intending to play parts in fighting corruption on every level of the economy, the real question was whether everybody was sharing the same definition of what corruption is.

“The leaders in the country, in both the public and the private sector must start leading from the front,” he said.

Goss said that the term ‘zero tolerance of corruption’ was being used as “cheap rhetoric” by the top leadership of the country, and that there was hardly any evidence of the policy being implemented.

“We need a strong strategic framework to be followed through with action,” he said.

Institute for Security Studies corruption programme head Daryl Balia said he is of the opinion that government was good at making strategic decisions and developing frameworks for the anticorruption fight, but that a lack of resources were holding back implementing a zero-tolerance policy.

“Fighting corruption is an immense undertaking, requiring a significant amount of resources, which I believe government just does not have, because of its development priorities,” he said.

Baloyi denied the allegation, arguing that every success achieved in the fight against corruption was a step closer to zero tolerance.

Meanwhile, Justice and Constitutional Development Minister Jeff Radebe said corruption is a cancer to efficacy. “Corruption is like a contagious disease, that by nature, usually involves more than one person,” he said.

The Minister added that it would be a good idea to name and shame financial offenders by establishing a public register. “Corruption leads to declining investor confidence in our country.”

This sentiment was confirmed by anticorruption coalition Transparency International, which said that South Africa’s transparency score had been in decline for the past five years. “South Africa’s score on its transparency index was 4.2%, whereas any score above 5% could be considered as ideal. This indicates that investor confidence in South Africa is declining due to corruption,” it said.

However, Radebe pointed to progress being made with government’s fight against corruption. He said that out of 362 cases investigated, the result was 155 convictions achieved, while a number of cases still continued in courts.

“Out of a total of about R3.3-billion under investigation, we were able to reimburse about R450-million to the victims of corruption,” he said.

His department would continue to intensify its focus on a number of corruption hot spots, such as officials involved with the procurement of services and goods.

“It is not cool to be corrupt,” he said.