The SA private sector has no need to crow any more about how it is better than the public sector. It is as incompetent, and perhaps nearly as corrupt, as the public sector. How else can we explain a bank employee, a specialist engineer, who allegedly transferred R103m into six different bank accounts in four months?

Where were the control measures in this bank? Several banks have also been cited for unlawful and/illicit conduct. Transgressions of banking laws are common cause where neither Sars nor financial crime intelligence operators could detect anomalies.

The private sector teems with rogues of diverse hues, ranging from crooked lawyers, devious doctors, dubious professors, rascal car dealerships, usurious banks and extortionate health institutions.

By private sector I do not include tenderpreneurs because these are not genuine private businesses but are political arrangements to access public funds. When I began writing in the media about our country in 1956, and when I listened to our leading thinkers then about the post-apartheid society they envisaged in the 1950s, I never imagined the rotten state we have built since 1994 that this would be our ideal.

A society dripping with rot and thievery in both the private and public sectors seems to be our settled state. The State Capture Commission as well as the SIU and the Competition Tribunal, let alone our judicial proceedings, have revealed much about venality and criminality in our country. With a slow coach criminal justice system, lawlessness will not be easily uprooted.

Prof Themba Sono, email