South Africa's whistleblowers deserve better
Solly Moeng
Reputation Management Strategist; Columnist; Accidental Political Contributor; Part-time Lecturer @ EU Business School | APR.
An official celebration of South Africa's whistleblowers – while long overdue – would be a step in the right direction, given that calls have been made for years for more to be done to protect and support these important individuals. Government must acknowledge their valuable contribution in the ongoing fight against corruption.
Acknowledgement is a positive step but by no means adequate. There must also be a much more serious discussion about concrete action to protect and assist whistleblowers, as well as a clear commitment that government is ready to implement some form of step-aside mechanism of its own for individuals that have been implicated in state capture or any other form of corruption.
Ties should also be severed or suspended with firms that have been implicated in unethical or criminal activities. Continued association with such individuals and firms in public institutions runs against the very spirit of so-called acknowledgement of whistleblowers' contributions.
Who are 'whistleblowers'?
Taking the term 'whistleblower' literally, it would be limited to individuals who actually take steps to blow the whistle – that is, to raise the alarm about wrongdoing to attract the attention of the media, the public, or others who either have the power or the authority to intervene, such as the police.
One online definition describes a whistleblower as a person who "informs on a person or organisation regarded as engaging in an unlawful or immoral activity".
Listed synonyms are, often unflatteringly, informant, collaborator, fifth columnist, double agent, spy, infiltrator, plant, betrayer, traitor, Judas, double-crosser, turncoat, tattletale, intelligence, and beagle.
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But whistleblowing comes in many forms. There are very loud and visible ones, there are softer ones, and there are silent ones. The loud and visible ones tend to receive all the media and public attention because they make their presence felt by their very sound as they're wont to.
But the softer and silent ones are not less important in the fight against crime. The continuum of whistleblowing therefore includes investigative journalists who quietly go about searching for, finding, or receiving crucial – often sensitive – information from people occupying strategic positions inside state institutions and private companies.
For a variety of obvious reasons, people who provide such information to investigative journalists do not seek media and public attention and will not celebrate publicly if the information they share culminates in criminal consequences for people implicated in wrongdoing.
They therefore rely on promises made by those they share the information with, often journalists and others in the media space, not to divulge their identity under any circumstances. It is a critical ingredient to silent whistleblowing.
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This is especially the case for vulnerable employees who desperately need to keep holding on to their jobs, for all the reasons we know, despite having decided that they cannot sit back and watch money budgeted for needed public services, or company money, being criminally diverted towards individuals and companies that should not be its recipients.
So, they quietly send relevant information to trusted outsiders, often investigative journalists, who will use their own processes to carry out more investigation to verify the authenticity of such information, also often at great personal risk, both while they carry out further investigation and when they publish incriminating information resulting from such investigations.
Many silent whistleblowers whose names will probably never be known have suffered; having been forced to resign quietly from their jobs, or summarily fired - following false accusations of, for example, incompetence, broken trust, etc., that would require expensive, potentially protracted, litigation they could not afford to fight. Some of these heroes have been made to disappear into the long list of the 'blacklisted'. Such people have at times been dealt with as if they were toxic, untouchable, by potential employers in the public and private sector, worried about 'business destroying consequences' if they employed them.
It is as if the rumour mill is able, at times, to circulate the names of those who have stood in the path of corruption, leading to very real consequences despite their attempts to guard their privacy.
There are others who, following their helpful, informative, testimony at the recently concluded Zondo Commission of Inquiry into State Capture, have returned to their desks but for scant reward.
Other whistleblowers have returned to work following seemingly hollow victories after emotionally draining CCMA processes that instructed reinstatement and backpay by their employers.
What South Africa needs, therefore, is a lot more than a PR-driven and superficial publicity-seeking celebration of the contribution by the broader community of corruption saboteurs. It needs, and really deserves, a comprehensive, standing, sufficiently resourced campaign with a clear action plan to gradually turn around the seemingly ingrained, certainly misplaced, perceptions of 'corruption saboteurs' as enemies of the public, or the country – the untouchables - into a generalised appreciation of the courageous role they play in placing public interest at the heart of everything they do, ahead of narrow personal and political party allegiance.
The much-abused South Africa deserves that much.
With good, credible, ethical, leadership, most South Africans can be turned over time into a community of people who will frown at anything that acts against shared public interest and both speak out and act against any signs of it; but this will not happen on its own.
If South Africa is to recover from almost two decades of criminal abuse, it would owe much of this recovery to the courageous stances taken by corruption saboteurs; loud and visible, less loud, and the silent and invisible ones, many of whom continue to suffer in silence as they struggle to revive destroyed livelihoods and, with that, dignity.
If South Africa gets this right, it would begin to be seen as a leader across Africa and the world and, over time, also resume attracting values-driven investors and needed skills to its shores again, ones who would be assured that there can still be consequences for unethical and criminal wrongdoing in a world that is increasingly seeming to be a rudderless, man-for-himself/woman-for-herself, ship lost out in open seas. The status quo is unsustainable.