Poetic Licence: Corruption isn’t gendered – and neither is consequence

In August, South Africa marks Women’s Month with speeches, banners, and borrowed inspiration from the heroines of 1956. We speak of progress, representation, and leadership tables now shared. We post hashtags, light candles, and host panels. But what happens when women reach the table and find it rotting from the inside?

Take Mpho Mofikoe, the Chief Operating Officer of SAMRO, the Southern African Music Rights Organisation. This month, as the country hoists slogans about women’s power and courage, Mofikoe finds herself suspended. Her alleged crime? Exposing fraud within the organisation, fraud reportedly amounting to more than R90 million.

In any country serious about ethics, whistleblowers are protected. In South Africa, they’re punished. Her suspension comes seemingly for daring to lift the veil on wrongdoing. In Women’s Month, she is being sidelined for doing the very thing we claim to honour: acting with integrity.

Contrast this with another story unfolding at the same time. The CEO of the Independent Development Trust (IDT), Tebogo Malaka, was recently filmed allegedly offering R60 000 to a journalist, Pieter-Louis Myburgh, to kill a corruption exposé. The evidence is damning. A PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) probe had already flagged irregularities involving IDT's R836 million oxygen plants scandal. 

We now live in a country where a woman suspended for exposing corruption receives the same treatment as a woman caught red-handed trying to bury evidence of her own. It’s a bleak symmetry; whistleblowers and wrongdoers, punished alike. If you’re looking for a parable of South African governance, there it is. And if you’re looking for a Women’s Month irony, look no further.

We say we want women in leadership. But we rarely ask: what kind of leadership? We assume that the rise of women will automatically cleanse institutions, correct histories, and soften the sharp edges of power. But as these stories show, corruption is not a gendered disease. And worse, when women do try to lead ethically, the system is ready to chew them up, just like the men before them.

Let’s be clear. Women do not need to be saints to be worthy of celebration. But we should at least be able to tell the difference between a woman standing up to rot and one drowning in it.

Mofikoe’s case reminds us that Women’s Month has become too comfortable, too shallow. We cannot keep painting over institutional rot with inspirational slogans and platitudes. We need more than candlelight vigils and curated hashtags. We need to protect those who lead with conscience. And we need to confront those who confuse position with impunity.

Women’s Month must grow up. It must stop being a cosmetic calendar event and start being a mirror. Not one that shows us just how far women have come, but a mirror of how far our institutions still have to go.

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