{UAH} Pojim/WBK: There are many faces of corruption: The good, the Many an African - Comment
|
1:04 PM |
No comments |
There are many faces of corruption: The good, the Many an African
There are so many ways of appreciating issues related to corruption in our countries, and some of them can be quite edifying.
I have heard of corruption as the very essence of power, as in power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. This would tend to mean that as long as you get involved with power, you cannot choose but be corrupt.
There are those who say there is good corruption and there is bad corruption.
They give examples of say a very corrupt system in which bribes and kickbacks are given and received on a daily basis but things get done, roads are built, buses and trains run on time and there are no power cuts. They contrast this with the other variety, where bribery is rife but nothing positive gets done.
Now, take this one: Some of our countries are so corrupt that it is fair to say that it's only corruption that guarantees the continued existence of the country. This is to say that corruption constitutes the pillars on which the whole edifice of the state is erected, and if you do away with it, the whole structure will come tumbling down.
The "good corruption" theory stands on the firm ground that all you want is to get things done, to build the economy, fight ignorance and disease, raise your people's living standards, reduce poverty and make as many people as possible happy. What else do you need, unless you are some grandstanding, holy-book-thumping moralist?
The "bad corruption" argument is also self-evident, seeing as it speaks to failure on both accounts of delivery and morality. That is to say, you are rotten and the rot is not even working for you, a kind of double jeopardy.
As for corruption constituting the very underpinnings of the state, well, let's think about that. With the kind of fragile state that every African country seems to be trapped in, a state that employs hordes of people it cannot pay and cannot deliver the most basic services to its citizenry, what are those underpaid officials supposed to
do to survive, just to survive?
And what about the citizens, who have no form of protection from the myriad attacks — from man and nature — and who have to fend for themselves at every turn as they try to make do with the barest minimum?
There is a certain uncanny inevitability of corruption in this kind of state, and I'm not just talking of the likes of Congo, Somalia, CAR and other egregious cases; we are all in this together, only some of us know it and some don't. Ramshackle semblances of states were bequeathed to us and we hastened to call them "republics" when they were not even nations. It is this fragility that in part informs our vulnerability and corruption.
True, some countries still possess the conscience to summon the power of agency to face up to corruption, such as when South Africans held demonstrations to condemn the creeping cancer gnawing at the very heart of "a broken country presided over by a broken man," to slightly alter a famous quote.
The strong civil society in that country gives it some hope that it will survive the staggering negativities of its rulers. That cannot be said of the majority of African countries in which civil societies are weak, splintered and ineffectual.
Rather, we are likely to borrow a leaf from the comical example of Vanuatu, where, while President Baldwin Lonsdale travelled abroad, the acting head of state, Marcelino Pipite, announced that he had pardoned himself and 11 other officials who had been convicted of bribery.
On his return, the president overruled the pardons and state authorities proceeded to arrest the "pardonees." If they are convicted and sentenced to two or more years in
prison, they will lose the right to sit in parliament again.
There's something very African about Vanuatu, and many an African ruler would admire what Pipite tried to do; we are the same. After all, one of the "pardonees" was the country's deputy prime minister, called, wait a minute, Mr Moanna Carcasses (sic).
Jenerali Ulimwengu is chairman of the board of the Raia Mwema newspaper and an advocate of the High Court in Dar es Salaam. E-mail:ulimwengu@jenerali.com
0 comments:
Post a Comment