An overwhelming majority of South Africa rate corruption as one of the main problems facing the post-apartheid order and, by implication, one on which the future welfare of their emerging nation depends.

The Country Assessment Report on Corruption, co-authorised by the African National Congress-led government and the United Nations office on drugs and crime, records that every eight in every 10 South Africans believe "there is a lot of corruption" in the fledgling society that came into existence with so much hope less than a decade ago.

There is, however, an incongruity between the actual experience of corruption by South African citizens, from the ordinary man or woman in the street to officials in the civil service, and their almost visceral conviction tht it is widespread. Extrapolating from surveys quoted in the report, it is evident that direct experience of corruption varies from minuscule 2 percent for individuals to 11 percent for families or households. A similar though less shrill dissonance is manifest between psychological perception and empirical experience in the business community : 62 percent of businessman and women categorise corruption as a serious issue in the business community against the relatively small percentage from whom a bribe has been either solicited (15 percent) or who have had to pay a bribe or extortion fee (7 percent and 4 percent respectively).

Two factors help to account for the discrepancy . One is th vigilance of the media in reporting actual or alleged cases of corruption, particularly those pertaining to politicians in the legislative and executive branches of government and to civil servants entrusted with the delivery of social services.

Hardly a day goes by without a major report of corruption in one form aor another. Another is a number of high profile cases where top-ranking members of the ruling ANC who have either been indicted by the courts for crimes that are classifiable as corruption - including bribery, extortion, fraud and theft of public money or donor money - or who are suspected of having committed these offences.

ANC notables whose probity has been blemished by court convictions include, in chronological order :

Allan Boesak, the former provincial leader of the ANC in the Western Cape, who was sentenced to imprisonment for three years for stealing money entrusted to him for the poor by Scandinavian donors;

Cynthia Maropeng, the former deputy speaker of the Mpumalanga legislature who is serving a seven-year prison sentence for pilfering money intended for ANC constituency projects;

Tony Yengeni, the former ANC parliamentary chief whip who faces a four-year prison sentence (against which he has appealed) for defrauding parliament; and

Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, whois seeking to avert imprisonment by appealing against her conviction on multiple counts of fraud and theft in the Pretoria high court, for which she was sentenced to jail for five years.

The impression that the ANC is struggling to contain corruption within its own ranks is strengthened by suspicions of financial improbity against men who are either situated in the uppermost echelons of the ANC or who have served in them in the past. Among them are two men who occupy the second and third highest positions in the ANC hierarchy after President Thabo Mbeki himself : Jacob Zuma and Mosiuoa Lekota, who respectively serve as deputy president and national chairperson of the Anc.

The allegation still hovers over Zuma, even after the decision not to prosecute him. It has been alleged that he solicited a bribe of R500 000 from Thales, the French-based armaments company that in an earlier form, when it was known as Thomson-CSF, won a contract to supply combat suites to four corvettes or frigates on order for the South African navy. Zuma has vigorously and repeatedly denied the allegations.

Zuma's close association with Schabir Shaik, the Durban businessman, does not help the cause. The controversial Shaik is the accused in a contemporary corruption case.

The shadow of impropriety has fallen across Lekota because of his failure to disclose his business interests in wine and petroleum in the Free State and property in KwaZulu-Natal, as required by the parliamentary code of conduct and the Executive Members Ethics Act. Lekota avers that his failure to do so was an accidental oversight rather than a wilful act. An ANC disciplinary hearing is in the offing.

In the eyes of its political adversaries these developments have brightened the ANC's election promises of 1994 and 1999 to govern in an open and honest manner and, of course, to take a tough stand against corruption. Thus human rights activist Rhoda Kadalie, who has won a reputation for her trenchant criticism of ANC policies and their implementation, writes of the morality debilitating impact on governance of "serial acts of corruption".

Raenette Taljaard, the spokesperson for the Democratic Alliance DA of finance, takes an even tougher line in a statement titled , The ANC and Corruption - Failing to Act is Acting to Fail. These statements from part of the incessant but justifiable scrutiny and appraisal of government actions by opposition parties and civil society in fulfilment of their commitment to the maintenance of good governance. The results of their surveillance offer a gloomy perspective.

Another more positive perspective emerges, however, when the ANC-led government in the historical context of decades of NP government. It is pertinent to recall that a senior member of the last NP government, Pietie du Plessis, was imprisoned for misappropriating trustee funds. It should be noted as well that two deputy ministers in the dying days of NP suffered the humiliation of imprisonment for monetary greed, namely :

Hennie van der Walt, a deputy minister in th now disbanded department of co-operation and development, was imprisoned for imbezlement; and

Abe Williams, a former deputy minister of social development, who found himself on the wrong side of the law and in prison for succumbing to the temptation of bribery.

These transgressions almost certainly represent the proverbial tip of the iceberg given the repressive legislation that the previous regime placed on the statute book to strengthen its capacity to deal with subversion and to halt the free flow of information and cover up the misdemeanours of its apparatchiks in the police force and the defence force.

The licensed killers in the "terrorist detection unit" at Vlakplaas and in the Orwellian-sounding Civil Co-operation Bureau, have, of course, won notoriety through their pitiless war against those they designated as "enemies of the state". But close examination of their modus operandi shows that they often had a taste for the good life and, as behoves a political mafia, a talent for making their actions profitable as well as murderous.

Whatever the deficiencies of the ANC government in the fight against corruption, there is nothing comparable to the unlawful and covert use of huge sums of public money by the National Party to establish death squads as part of its strategy of total defence of the existing order.

Nor is there any parallel in the ANC's record of governance to the previous regime's furtive diversion of public funds to establish a newspaper, The Citizen, to wage political war on its behalf.

The NP's moral trespasses serve as a reminder of what can happen if corruption is not checked timeously and if the ruling party begins to flirt with the dangerous notion that the end justifies the means.

Patrick Laurence is the editor of Focus, the journal of the Helen Suzman Foundation. This is an extract from a larger article on corruption published in the current edition.

With acknowledgements to Patrick Laurence and the Sunday Independent.