9 December 2011 is International Anti-Corruption Day and will be marked in South Africa by a National Anti-Corruption Summit. Corruption has been identified as one of the greatest threats to our democracy.
Khulumani is proud of the stands made by members in exposing ‘collusive tendering processes’ that have taken place in some hospitals where senior management has facilitated the awading of tenders to family members.
However, since the Third National Anti-Corruption Summit that was held in 2008, there has been almost no implementation of the resolutions of that summit that called for:
* regulations to be developed to provide for transparency in party political funding;
* all elected and appointed public officials and political parties to be required to disclose their business interests;
* regulations to be created to regulate the employment of politicians in the private sector after they leave the public sector – the so-called revolving door phenomenon;
* systems of disclosure of interests to be developed for all sectors of society;
* companies found guilty of the offences of price-fixing, market allocation and collusive tendering, to be prohibited from state tenders for a determined period.
* individuals responsible for these practices to be held accountable and sanctioned for their roles in price-fixing, market-allocation and collusive tendering; and for
* the business community to be encouraged to apply self-regulating mechanisms to improve their ethical conduct in practice. Some suggestions in this regard are available on http://www.nacf.org.za
