{UAH} Allan/Edmund/Gook/Pojim: Graft rules: States will be eaten, leaders will fall... - Comment

http://www.theeastafrican.co.ke/OpEd/comment/Corruption-rules-African-States-will-be-eaten-leader-will-fall/434750-3493152-u2dr7uz/index.html

Graft rules: States will be eaten, leaders will fall...

According to last week's issue of The EastAfrican, the 2016 Rwanda Bribery Index released by Transparency International Rwanda and the Office of the Ombudsman showed thatcorruption has inched up in the country.

It is not anywhere close to the astronomic corruption levels reported regularly in Kenya, Uganda, South Sudan and Burundi, but because Rwanda has had one of the cleanest noses in Africa, it is significant.

It is significant because it shows that the momentum in the region, like in most of Africa, favours corruption. In other words, the crooks are winning.

A lot of sweat has gone into dissecting why our countries struggle to fight corruption, and how it can be defeated. Also why leaders, public officials, and private businesses enable it.

Not much investment is being made in understanding how corruption is reshaping states.

While corruption imperils governments and leaders, that is in the long-term. In the short term, we have to confront an uncomfortable truth — corruption has made political leaders more powerful.

For a long time, especially in countries where electoral politics tended to be organised along ethnic and regional lines, a leader from the central part, would struggle to win over the northern areas of his country.

It was even more difficult when politics was organised around religion.

The combination of the growing normalisation of corruption, and the bounty of the economic boom of recent years in Africa that is now dying out, did two things.

It enabled leaders to cut through tribal and regional walls and buy support across the political divide, in ways they would not have done using "just mouth," as the West Africans say.

Corruption, in that sense, is the new magic bipartisan potion.

It has had a second related effect: A further decline of ideology in our politics. A bribe is a bribe, no matter if the MP who is eating it is a communist, free market hardliner, social or liberal democrat.

However, corruption is corrosive, as it eats away the resources for public goods, and is not able to replenish the well.

Corruption is also terribly inefficient. There is no known way of spreading the benefits of graft to everyone nationally.

It therefore breeds a very bitter form of rejectionist politics, one that can also be secessionist in nature, as we are seeing in the continuing violence in South Sudan.

‎Today, a lot of activism is going into throwing out the bad guys in future elections, and you would think that the normal response by angry voters would be exactly that.

It is the kind of linear thinking laced with too-much optimism that enabled a disagreeable fellow like Donald Trump to win the US presidential election.

Kenya shows that people, especially at the county level, are more likely to embrace a corrupt populist who better shares the ill-gotten bounty with them, than an angel who promises to end all graft.

The corrosive effect of corruption seems to be that it is turning people toward looking for their own thieves, not saints who will save everyone.

The logic of runaway corruption in Africa then is that states will be eaten to the bone.

Leaders will fall precisely because eventually they had nothing to buy support with.

Charles Onyango-Obbo is publisher of data visualiser Africapaedia and Rogue Chiefs. Twitter@cobbo3

Graft rules: States will be eaten, leaders will fall... - Comment

http://www.theeastafrican.co.ke/OpEd/comment/Corruption-rules-African-States-will-be-eaten-leader-will-fall/434750-3493152-u2dr7uz/index.html

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