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Received: 2025-02-11 | Accepted: 2025-06-04 | Published: 2025-09-30

Title

Challenges related to accountability in South African public service

Abstract

The study examines the challenges that cause a lack of accountability (focus) in South African public service (locus). Personal greed for financial gain, continuously rising professional status, and demand for authoritative powers are all linked to a lack of personal values that create employee expectations. It is considered corrupt behaviour when achieving personal goals, which involves taking shortcuts through contacts, favouritism, nepotism, and bribery. At the same time, allowing these personal gains to be realised through accepting bribes or giving strategic positions to favoured ones is unethical behaviour. In this scenario, both parties—the giver and the receiver—are being unethical. The study substantiates this situation by compiling information through a document review. This document review was a qualitative study whereby official documents were reviewed to highlight corruption and misconduct statistics. The data was assessed using conceptual and document analysis. The findings reveal a lack of accountability in public service, attributed to a lack of political will to combat corruption, political interference, bureaucratic red tape, and inadequate measures to impose penalties, among other factors. More challenges are discussed in the study. The literature review and analysis of documents assisted the author in proposing a framework called the Accountability Framework for Public Service that suggests measures to enhance accountability and combat corruption at the political, policy, and institutional levels. The framework proposed in the study can be considered an inductive contribution to public administration, management, and governance.

Keywords

accountability, corruption, qualitative study, misconduct, public service, South Africa

JEL classifications

D73 , H83

URI

http://jssidoi.org/ird/article/205

DOI

DOI 10.70132/n5486947758

Pages

52-68

Funding

This is an open access issue and all published articles are licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License

Authors

Vyas-Doorgapersad , Shikha

University of Johannesburg, Johannesburg, South Africa https://www.uj.ac.za

Articles by this author in: CrossRef | Google Scholar

Journal title

Insights into Regional Development

Volume

Number

Issue date

September 2025

Issue DOI

DOI 10.70132/t9255692945

ISSN

ISSN 2345-0282 (online)

Publisher

VšĮ Entrepreneurship and Sustainability Center, Vilnius, Lithuania

Cited

Article views & downloads

HTML views: 453 | PDF downloads: 331

References

Abdulai, I., Salakpi, A., & Nassè, T.B. 2021. Internal audit and quality of financial reporting in the public sector: The case of university for development studies, Finance & Accounting Research Journal, 3(1), 1-23. https://doi.org/10.51594/farj.v3i1.231