TIME, it appears, may both heal wounds and erase memory. An example is the argument made by former Democratic Alliance leader Tony Leon (on these pages) that, despite the brutality of its system, the apartheid political elite practised greater internal accountability than we see today.This argument is part of a greater pathology that far too many South Africans have come to tolerate: that economic crime has blossomed in the post-apartheid era, and that public accountability has withered. The suggestion is that the new dispensation is both more corrupt and lazier in applying the rules of accountability.This shouldn’t be reduced to an argument about which system of governance is more corrupt. Rather, we need a serious conversation, involving all South Africans, about the long tail of corruption in South Africa. We need this because we are in a messy middle ground in which the democratic government has been unwilling or unable to investigate the economic crimes of the old order — some ...
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