Governance, corruption and COVID-19: the final nail in the coffin for South Africa's dwindling public finances.

Abstract

In 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic confronted politicians and public servants in South Africa with unprecedented challenges. The COVID-19 pandemic has not only laid bare the inequalities within South African society but sadly, it has also portrayed how successive South African public sectors have failed to deal with corruption which has become entrenched within every sector of society. Nonetheless, while the government was pre¬occupied with the interventions for reducing the spread of COVID-19, some officials saw this as an opportunity for self-enrichment, which compounded South Africa's ability to contain the spread of the pandemic. Insofar as significant attention has been placed on corruption concerning COVID-19, in reality, for the last decade, South Africa's dwindling public finances have been in the spotlight for several reasons such as higher remu¬neration paid to state employees, bailouts to failing state-owned enterprises and the high cost of servicing the country's debt. The corruption witnessed in the COVID-19 era exerted tremendous pressure on the country's dwindling public finances evident by the country securing loans from the IMF, African Development Bank and the BRICS bank. This article, therefore, seeks to exam¬ine how corruption and COVID-19 further contributed to the decline of South Africa's public finances. The article rests on the following questions: to what extent has cor¬ruption been detrimental to the government's efforts to contain COVID-19? And to what extent have public finances been affected by corruption and COVID-19. The article critically reviews the literature to answer the mentioned questions to understand the effects of corruption during covid-19 on public finances.