Johannesburg — WHEN in doubt, form a committee. That may seem an unduly cynical response to the Cabinet's decision to set up an interministerial committee to investigate and recommend "extraordinary steps" to deal with corruption. After all, it is an advance on the past administration's tendency to ignore mounting evidence of corruption in the hope that it would somehow disappear.

And President Jacob Zuma has proved as good as his word in a number of other areas where promises have been made, both before the Polokwane conference in 2007 and during the build-up to the April election.

Some may not be convinced that the way the government is going about things is morally right or likely to prove effective in the long run -- the "Wild West" approach to reducing the rate of violent crime is a case in point -- but you cannot deny that Zuma seems determined to fulfil his promises, come hell or high water.

That is certainly better than Mbeki's head-in-the-sand approach, and infinitely more helpful than what is emerging as the last refuge of incompetents in SA: accusing those who complain of rising corruption levels of being either racist or Uncle Toms.

And there is nothing wrong with the overall plan per se. In addition to setting up the interministerial committee, this entails devising and implementing a comprehensive anticorruption strategy, with Zuma likely to use next year's state of the nation address to announce concrete steps that will be taken to crack down on corrupt public servants.

Some measures, such as stricter monitoring of senior government officials' business dealings and tendering activities, as well as cooling-off periods to prevent private-sector nest- feathering prior to resignations, are already in the pipeline.

Others, including legislative amendments and the appointment of a permanent anticorruption investigative unit and commission, as suggested recently by African National Congress (ANC) treasurer-general Mathews Phosa, are worth considering once sufficient research has been done on their likely efficacy.

It is also highly encouraging that the ruling party is at last recognising -- even if only at local government level -- that political interference is a significant contributing factor to high corruption levels.

According to Deputy Co- operative Governance Minister Yunus Carrim, the intention is to change the law to prevent elected officials such as mayors and councillors from interfering with municipal managers. This has emerged as a major obstacle to clean governance at municipal level, because the way local government is structured allows minor politicians who are on the take to fire or suspend accounting officers if they start sniffing around suspect tenders or asking questions about irregular expenditure.

This amounts to quite an admission for the ruling party, which controls the overwhelming majority of SA's failed municipalities, where such political interference is par for the course. And it is only a small step away from acknowledging a closely allied contributor to SA's corruption problem -- the ANC's stubborn refusal to recognise that its policy of deploying cadres to all influential positions virtually guarantees a culture of rent- seeking and influence-peddling .

It is the continued avoidance of this issue that prevents this newspaper from getting overly excited by the Zuma administration's seemingly tough stance on corruption. It may well achieve some success in addressing the most blatant examples at municipal level and among public servants. But the culture of corruption that is steadily taking hold in SA stems from the way politicians behave, and there has been little indication so far that Zuma has the stomach to demand accountability on this score from his comrades at the most senior level of government.

Indeed, the manner in which he himself avoided having to answer to corruption charges gives sustenance to the saying that "a fish rots from the head".

Committee is a move in the right direction, but avoidance of the issue of cadre deployment makes it hard not to be cynical