Enact legislation to protect whistle blowers

While organisations in Zimbabwe have tended to use it as a stand-alone issue mostly through the tip-offs anonymous facility, research shows that its best results are secured when the tool is used as part of a comprehensive ethics management programme.
These include other ethics infrastructure like ethics codes, ethics officers, ethics training, ethics reward and punishment, and ethics evaluation.
Near and Miceli (1995) define whistle blowing as the disclosure by organisational members, former or current, of illegal, immoral, or illegitimate practices under the control of their employers, to persons and organisations that may be able to effect action.
In Zimbabwe whistle blowing once took a national outlook when Dr Gideon Gono on his appointment to the governorship of the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe in December 2003 established the Whistle Blower Fund that was meant to reward financially those who will have exposed malpractice in the business sector.
The Tip-Offs Anonymous facility run by Deloitte and Touche to which a number of organisations in the country subscribe is a clear effort to use the whistle blowing mechanism in reporting corporate misconduct and protecting organisational assets.
Organisations should encourage whistle blowing as a way of managing corporate malpractices.
Through whistle blowing, management will secure early awareness of misconduct in order to manage ethical risks.
By knowing first, management can protect the organisation from needless damage of its reputation and loss of company assets.
It is important to note that corporate leaders should realise that ethical conduct does not happen by itself.
Ethics should be actively managed, and actively managing an organisation’s ethics means implementing an ethics program with the whistle blowing mechanism being a key factor of that effort.
Nevertheless, whistle blowing is not without its own controversies. Whistle blowing efforts to uncover wrongdoing within the organisation has tended to be associated with taking high personal risk on the part of the whistle blower.
Blowing the whistle can be problematic to the one who chooses to blow the whistle since they can be viewed as someone who is trying to cause trouble for the organisation and others.
So may face backlash as a result of coming forward even if the whistle blowing may result in positive results for the organisation.
The issue of culture in most instances plays a crucial role on whether one should blow the whistle or not, and whether the deed will be appreciated by management or the general society.
While some cultures do not see anything wrong in whistle blowing, others are very hostile to those who blow the whistle as they are instantly labelled traitors (vatengesi) and become unwanted elements in the community.
Some view whistle blowing as an act of disloyalty because the whistle blower’s public exposure of the immoral practice in the business is a violation of loyalty to fellow employees.
Thus some employees are discouraged from blowing the whistle because their feelings of loyalty to immediate colleagues take precedence over the far more abstract concept of loyalty to the organisation.
Whistle blowers who use anonymous reporting mechanisms are obviously engulfed by the feeling of fear; fear of being ostracised or losing their jobs, their future, their families, and even their safety.
They are overcome by fear of retaliation. The death of the Indian engineer who reported incidents of corruption on a US$2 billion highway project directly to the Indian Prime Minister’s office but whose identity was not protected despite his request, is a telling example.
Factors that tend to determine whether one blows the whistle or not are one’s intentions, one’s level of ethical reasoning and ethical standing, or the effect of culture as highlighted above.
Some people blow the whistle after realising that they have been shortchanged by colleagues in a malpractice they were also part of.
Much as whistle blowing has its controversies, the tool is a proven mechanism in propagating responsible business conduct.
However, what has become crystal clear in its use is the fact that it produces the best results when supported by legal mechanisms that protect the whistle blower from any form of retaliation or victimisation.
Zimbabwe should come up with legislation that protects whistle blowers in all sectors of the economy.
Several laws the world over have been put in place to protect whistle blowers from victimisation, and to serve as governance enhancement tools.
Examples are the UK Public Interest Disclosure Act, 1999, the US Sarbanes-Oxley Act, 2002, and South Africa’s Protected Disclosures Act.
Whistle blowers need protection in order to curtail fears associated with whistle blowing.
The Tips-offs Anonymous that is administered by Deloitte and Touche could have been more effective in curtailing corporate malpractices if whistleblowers were protected by an Act of Parliament.
Legal protection of whistle blowers will protect them from lawsuits, harassments, job loss and unjustified demotions, and will secure compensation for those who suffer reprisals or victimisation as a result of revealing wrong doing at the workplace. It will give them the confidence they need to report company misconduct.
In the absence of legal protection for would-be whistle blowers, very few employees are prepared to sacrifice their jobs and their families’ future for the sake of public health and well being.
Management assurance that those who report malpractices will not be ignored, silenced, or punished for divulging misconduct is a proven confidence booster for the would be whistle blower.
A paper written by Dennis Masaka, co-patron of the Society for Applied Ethics at Great Zimbabwe University and published in the Journal of Business Ethics and Organisation Studies in 2007 provides an inspiring and academically grounded articulation of whistle blowing in the context of Zimbabwe’s current economic challenges.
Corporate organisations in the country have generally remained disinterested and hostile towards the implementation of behaviour changing comprehensive ethics programmes, probably because the people who are supposed to lead the process are seemingly the main beneficiaries of the corporate malpractices endemic in the country.
However it is my personal conviction that now is the time to take off the gloves and attack the corporate malfeasance scourge in the country head-on.
l Bradwell Mhonderwa is the Managing Consultant of Business Ethics Centre, a Corporate Governance and Business Ethics Management firm. Phone 04-293 2948, 0712 420 090, 0912 913 875, or email [email protected]