Far from the glare of courtroom cameras and the political theatre that has come to define SA’s anti-corruption conversation, a different kind of battle is being waged inside the presidency.
It is unglamorous and largely invisible to the public – but those closest to it insist it is working.
Jonathan Timm, a senior official in the presidency’s anti-corruption coordination function, laid out the architecture of this effort at an Institute for Security Studies (ISS) seminar in Johannesburg recently.
He described a set of interlocking mechanisms that constitute what may be the most coherent and systemic anti-corruption framework SA has ever assembled.
The starting point for accountability is the president’s formal response to the state capture commission, chaired by former chief justice Raymond Zondo.
The commission’s recommendations — spanning criminal prosecutions, asset recovery, disciplinary processes and institutional reform — were translated into 60 discrete, trackable actions.
Now, 60% of those 60 actions have been completed or are substantially complete. Progress is monitored through the Accountability Tracker — a civil society-led tool developed under the leadership of the ISS that has become an indispensable reference point for measuring implementation.
Crucially, the 60 actions do not focus only on prosecutions and recoveries but include the structural and procedural reforms that Zondo identified as the preconditions for preventing a repeat of state capture.
It is in this less visible territory where much of the remaining 40% of work is concentrated.
One of the most consequential anti-corruption interventions being finalised is the central register for dismissals and resignations with disciplinary cases pending.
The register directly confronts one of the most corrosive patterns in public administration: the recycling of corrupt or delinquent officials between government departments.
For years, an official dismissed from a national department for fraud or misconduct could walk into a provincial department or municipality the following month, their record invisible to the new employer.
The result was a revolving door that allowed compromised individuals to re-enter the civil service with impunity.
The central register, built on existing public service and administration department infrastructure, closes that door. Any recruiting authority across all three spheres of government can now input an ID number and receive an immediate, online response indicating whether that individual has been dismissed or resigned while facing a disciplinary case.
Regulations requiring all appointing authorities to consult it before any appointment now await the signature of the minister of public service and administration.
The practical effect will be that no government entity will be able to claim ignorance of a candidate’s record. Failure to consult the register will constitute an administrative failure.
Over 12,000 dismissed or delinquent officials are now on the register, and no government department can appoint anyone without checking it first.
The presidency has spent three years building a granular tracking mechanism for Special Investigating Unit (SIU) recommendations, bringing together the presidency, the planning, monitoring and evaluation department, the National Prosecuting Authority, the SIU itself, and the state IT agency in a shared data and monitoring architecture.
What makes the initiative distinctive is its methodology. Rather than outsourcing the solution to a technology vendor — a pattern that has produced expensive, underperforming systems across government — the presidency adopted an iterative, in-house approach, working with existing state-owned IT capabilities and the officials who will ultimately own the system.
Undergirding all of these initiatives is the presidency’s digital transformation roadmap, My Mzansi — a commitment to digital public infrastructure: foundational, interoperable, state-owned data systems that replace the fragmented, siloed, often corruptible architecture of the past.
Four interventions define the current push. First, a single trusted digital services portal — a unified citizen-government interface to eliminate fragmentation historically exploited for corruption.
Second, a digital identity system anchored at the department of home affairs, creating a single authoritative source of identity verification across all sectors.
Third, Mzansi Exchange — a government data exchange platform that enables authorised data sharing across institutions.
Fourth, and potentially most significant, a digital payments infrastructure that will allow the state to track, analyse and audit all government payments in near-real time.
The ability to detect anomalous payment patterns — payments to entities sharing addresses, payments outside normal hours, duplicates, and payments to individuals on the central register — moves anti-corruption action from reactive to anticipatory.
“A single trusted digital identity, a unified data exchange, trackable digital payments — these are the foundations that make corruption structurally harder,” says Timm.
SA’s anti-corruption story has, for too long, been told almost exclusively through its most dramatic chapters — the verdicts, the perp walks, the damning commission findings.
The work being done quietly inside the presidency suggests that the most important chapters may yet be the ones written in system documentation, data governance protocols, and lines of code. Unglamorous. And absolutely essential.
- Rantao is editor-in-chief of The African Mirror
