Counting the costs of corruption: What could have been…

It’s no secret the poor are the hardest hit when it comes to a recession. Now you can add corruption to that list only because of what the money could have bought.

There’s no accurate way to measure corruption in South Africa with estimates ranging from R200bn to R3trn since the end of Apartheid, but if an RDP house costs on average R300,000 to build and sleeps 4 to 6 people…

And while not all the money lost to corruption would have been earmarked for roofs over people’s heads, it still equates to between 666,000 and 10mn homes for between 2.6mn and 60mn people. Those numbers would win any party an election…