Consumed by corruption

Mar 20, 2015 Editorial

The culture of corruption has permeated every level of our society. We assume that things would only get worse, because many who are not yet corrupt are beginning to realise that the wrongdoing is significantly enhancing their lifestyles.
But those persons represent a select few. The masses suffer as a result of the transgressions.
This notion was expressed by World Bank Group President Jim Yong Kim, when he declared corruption “public enemy number one” in developing countries, and told participants at an anti-corruption forum, “Every dollar that a corrupt official or a corrupt business person puts in their pocket is a dollar stolen from a pregnant woman who needs health care; or from a girl or a boy who deserves an education; or from communities that need water, roads, and schools. Every dollar is critical if we are to reach our goals to end extreme poverty by 2030 and to boost shared prosperity.”
That in essence presents the picture as clearly as it could be depicted.
Studies have shown that countries greatest affected are those with “nationalized economies, authoritarian governments and recently democratized societies.
Scholars perceive corruption as not a cultural flaw but a symptom of a sick state.
Some believe that corruption helps “grease the wheels” of an otherwise inefficient bureaucracy and economy. Companies that do business in places where corruption exists often say they have no choice but to pay bribes and kickbacks because that is the way business is done”.
In the World Bank Group’s “Helping Countries Combat Corruption: The Role of the World Bank,” the following is observed:
“The government benefits purchased with bribes vary by type and size. Contracts and other benefits can be enormous (grand or wholesale corruption) or very small (petty or retail corruption), and the impact of misinterpretation of laws can be dramatic or minor.
Grand corruption is often associated with international business transactions and usually involves politicians as well as bureaucrats. The bribery transaction may take place entirely outside the country. Petty corruption may be pervasive throughout the public sector if firms and individuals regularly experience it when they seek a license or a service from government.
The bribes may be retained by individual recipients or pooled in an elaborate sharing arrangement. The sums involved in grand corruption may make newspaper headlines around the world, but the aggregate costs of petty corruption, in terms of both money and economic distortions, may be as great if not greater.
Theft of state assets by officials charged with their stewardship is also corruption. An extreme form is the large-scale “spontaneous” privatization of state assets by enterprise managers and other officials in some transition economies. At the other end of the scale is petty theft of items such as office equipment and stationery, vehicles, and fuel. The perpetrators of petty theft are usually middle- and lower-level officials, compensating, in some cases, for inadequate salaries. Asset control systems are typically weak or nonexistent, as is the institutional capacity to identify and punish wrongdoers.
Theft of government financial resources is another form of corruption. Officials may pocket tax revenues or fees (often with the collusion of the payer, in effect combining theft with bribery), steal cash from treasuries, extend advances to themselves that are never repaid, or draw pay for fictitious “ghost” workers, a pattern well documented in the reports of audit authorities. In such cases financial control systems typically have broken down or are neglected by managers.
Corruption within government can take place at both the political and the bureaucratic levels. The first may be independent of the second, or there may be collusion. At one level, controlling political corruption involves election laws, campaign finance regulations, and conflict of interest rules for parliamentarians. At another level corruption may be intrinsic to the way power is exercised and may be impossible to reduce through lawmaking alone. In the extreme case, state institutions may be infiltrated by criminal elements and turned into instruments of individual enrichment.
Corruption is systemic (pervasive or entrenched) where bribery, on a large or small scale, is routine in dealings between the public sector and firms or individuals.”
It is quite disconcerting that all of the above are familiar to us and continue to consume our society after almost 50 years of independence. To combat this state of affairs may take generations.