blockchain will defeat corruption in South Africa

The Blockchain revolution is exciting. With the growing popularity of cryptocurrencies, the world is watching how their use is transforming the financial and banking sectors, creating new cryptocurrency millionaires and mining fevers.

But blockchain technology has another function that can be used for the common good - distributed database technology. Such technology would help combat corruption in government agencies and make the South African economy transparent.

Let's imagine what would happen if this technology were introduced into all government departments. Transactions of most types of cryptocurrencies are sent to a public key, which is anonymous. In this case, every government department, employee, supplier and contractor could be identified by their own public key.

The Treasury, educational institutions, perhaps even every public school (where corruption has been found to be among the highest in South Africa) and every associated supplier or contractor would have such a key.

That is, anyone could look up the public key of any particular school or supplier and look up information about each budget transfer transaction into an account (wallet) of such a school. Essentially, anyone could audit every government transaction in South Africa.

Currently, auditing government public accounts is a large, complex and expensive process carried out by a separate department. Accessing information about the transactions of any government department or vendor is completely impossible for the average person. The Comptroller General is the only person legally authorized to audit government accounts and report on how the government is spending taxpayer money in the country. Why is there only one person doing the oversight when 50 million can do it?

The second exciting implementation of blockchain technology is the rules for processing transactions. This implementation is already possible in more advanced forms of blockchain, such as Ethereum contracts, which can be programmed to require multi-signature confirmation and have different rules for approving transactions.

To take an example, going back to the South African public education system: in its annual budget, the government allocates a certain amount for education.. Using blockchain technology, funds from the state budget would only be available for transfer to accounts approved for such purposes. Every penny (rand) of expenditure could be monitored to prevent a situation where a billion rand is wasted on school textbooks that never make it into schools.

Schools could monitor their funding in a more transparent manner. For example, a particular school would have the right to spend a certain amount of money on educational materials purchased from a trusted supplier. Any attempts to exceed this amount or make payments to unauthorized accounts would be automatically rejected.

You must agree that such a distribution of budget funds is very reminiscent of the rosy dreams of every taxpayer. And a nightmare for any corrupt official.

According to https://qz.com