Ethical Leadership: Resolving the Failure of Public Policies in Corruption Prevention

Abstract

Unethical conduct of political office-bearers and public officials in the South African government - in both its grand and petty forms - is most contentious and of intricate concern. Despite numerous promulgated statutes, policies and regulations to promote ethical conduct, continued reports and newspaper articles about corruption in the public service raises questions about the perceived efficacy of these prescripts. In this article the authors review the South African ethics and anti-corruption policy framework and the literature on public policy implementation as well as key causes of implementation failure. Anecdotal evidence suggests that limited success has been achieved in preventing and combatting malfeasance in the South African public service. The authors propose that the solution lies at the departmental and operational levels of public policy implementation. At these levels public office-bearers and senior public officials act both as conceptualisers and authors of policy content as well as implementation agents of such policy instruments. Three (3) implementation variables are of key concern i.e. the nature of policy content, the capacity of those responsible to implement it, and the commitment to ensure that policy is not only what is publicly expressed but also what is done in practice. Whereas policy content is of critical concern and should reflect the attributes of the implementation context, it is mainly the latter two (2) variables which receive attention in this article. Ethical leadership - a central construct which encapsulates both the implementation variables of capacity and commitment - is proposed as a sin qua non for policy implementation success.