Abstracts

73 Introduction Corruption plagues South African governance and politics, and, despite the country’s robust set of laws and policies to mitigate it, the lack of transparency, accountability, and law enforcement further exacerbates the issue. Corruption, specifically in the public health system, threatens South African society because it undermines the government’s ability to uphold the Constitution, which states that access to health care is a basic human right. Fortunately, the extent of corruption has become more apparent to South Africans. In October 2019, President Cyril Ramaphosa launched the Health Sector Anti-Corruption Forum, aimed at harmonizing anticorruption efforts across government and civil society organizations and facilitating collaboration and information to prevent, detect, and prosecute corruption in the health sector. At the forum, advocate Andy Nthibi, head of the Special Investigating Unit, reported that fraud, waste, and abuse in health care expenditure amounted to about R39B ($2.2B) per year, money that otherwise could have been used to treat patients and support health in South Africa (The Presidency, 2019). Additionally, of the top 10 contributors that were responsible for 53% of irregular expenditure, four of them were departments of health (Auditor-General of South Africa [AGSA], 2017). 1 Ranking 176th in the world in terms of health care outcomes versus per capita spending (de Beer, 2018), the South African health care system proves inefficient in government health spending, and corruption only contributes to the issue. With just 50% of government total health expenditure supporting the 84%of South 1 According to AGSA, irregular expenditure is expenditure that was not incurred or did not comply with legislation. While further investigations are needed to be performed to determine whether the root cause of the expenditure was due to corruption, it is correlated to corruption. COMBATING CORRUPTION IN THE SOUTH AFRICAN PUBLIC HEALTH SECTOR Christianna Angeli S. Pepingco Corruption in the public health sector threatens the health and well-being of South Africans, and inadequate accountability and enforcement by the government allow for injustices to prevail. This article discusses how the vulnerabilities of the South African public health system allow corruption to persist, evaluating current efforts to mitigate corruption and offering recommendations to improve tactics in the fight against it. Perspectives on Business and Economics, Vol. 38, 2020