Corruption is not just a failure of leadership. It is the predictable result of giving government too much power over money, permits, contracts, and opportunity.
I don't know why but when I subscribe to your substack it will still show me as not subscribed next time I read something from you.
On the article, this is true. Everywhere with an excess of power and discretion in government officials, you get corruption. For example totalitarian regimes are notoriously corrupt. But I still think there is something in African cultures that produces the worst kind of corruption.
China is corrupt but they know they can't kill the goose that lays the golden egg so they do enough to build prosperity (putting aside the question of its sustainability) and build a strong military. Africans don't care, they will even steal the pillar holding up the roof and steal the fence keeping away the other criminals.
And apartheid SA corruption is very different from modern SA corruption.
Mpiyakhe, on your point of Africans apparently being especially adapt to corruption: I once listened to Dr. Frans Cronjé who said that if the ANC implimented the right economic policies, the economy would have grown so fast that they even could have stolen as much as they did, and we would still have been a lot better off! (I paraphrased him, but I think he may have had much the same view as you...)
I don't know why but when I subscribe to your substack it will still show me as not subscribed next time I read something from you.
On the article, this is true. Everywhere with an excess of power and discretion in government officials, you get corruption. For example totalitarian regimes are notoriously corrupt. But I still think there is something in African cultures that produces the worst kind of corruption.
China is corrupt but they know they can't kill the goose that lays the golden egg so they do enough to build prosperity (putting aside the question of its sustainability) and build a strong military. Africans don't care, they will even steal the pillar holding up the roof and steal the fence keeping away the other criminals.
And apartheid SA corruption is very different from modern SA corruption.
Mpiyakhe, on your point of Africans apparently being especially adapt to corruption: I once listened to Dr. Frans Cronjé who said that if the ANC implimented the right economic policies, the economy would have grown so fast that they even could have stolen as much as they did, and we would still have been a lot better off! (I paraphrased him, but I think he may have had much the same view as you...)