ARE WE TRULY CORRUPT IN OUR WORLD?

What is corruption?

The simplest definition is:

Corruption is the misuse of public power (by elected politician or appointed civil servant) for private gain.

In order to ensure that not ony public corruption but also private corruption between individuals and businesses could be covered by the same simple definition:

Corruption is the misuse of entrusted power (by heritage, education, marriage, election, appointment or whatever else) for private gain.

This broader definition covers not only the politician and the public servant, but also the CEO and CFO of a company, the notary public, the team leader at a workplace, the administrator or admissions-officer to a private school or hospital, the coach of a soccer team, etcetera.

                                                         

A much more difficult, scientific definition for the concept ‘corruption’ was developed by profesor (emeritus) dr. Petrus van Duyne:

Corruption is an improbity or decay in the decision-making process in which a decision-maker consents to deviate or demands deviation from the criterion which should rule his or her decision-making, in exchange for a reward or for the promise or expectation of a reward, while these motives influencing his or her decision-making cannot be part of the justification of the decision.

Major corruption comes close whenever major events involving large sums of money, multiple ‘players’, or huge quantities of products (think of food and pharmaceuticals) often in disaster situations, are at stake. Preferably, corruption flourishes in situations involving high technology (no one understands the real quality and value of products), or in situtions that are chaotic. Think of civil war: who is responsible and who is the rebel? Natural disasters like earthquakes, floods, droughts. The global community reacts quickly but local government might be disorganised and disoriented. Who maintains law and order? Or maybe the purchase of a technologically far advanced aircraft, while only a few can understand the technologies implied in development and production of such a plane. Mostly , the sums of money involved are huge, a relatively small amount of corrupt payment is difficult to attract attention. Or the number of actions is very large, for instance in betting stations for results of Olympic Games or international soccer-tournaments which can easily be manipulated. Geo-politics might play a role like e.g. the East-West conflict did in the second half of the 20th century, in which the major country-alliances sought support from non-aligned countries.

Fighting corruption takes place in many ‘theaters’:

• political reforms, including the financing of political parties and elections;
• economic reforms, regulating markets and the financial sector;
• financial controls: budget, bookkeeping, reporting;
• Public supervision: media, parliament, local administrators and councils, registration;
• free access to information and data;
• maintaining law and order;
• improving and strengthening of the judicial system;
• institutional reforms: Tax systems, customs, public administration in general;
• Whistleblowers and civil society organisations (NGO’s).

We know that corruption will not disappear from society. Our efforts are meant to restrict corruption and to protect as much as possible the poor and weak in our societies. In the end all corruption costs are paid by the consumer and the tax-payer. They need protection.

The small corruption (peanuts, facilitation payments – allowed by the OECD!) do not cost much but are awksome to the public. It is less damaging in total amounts but it makes it difficult to understand why we fight the grand corruption if we fail to fight the small ‘bakshis’. Major corruption thrives on a broad base of small corruption-payments or bribes.

Characteristics of Corruption

Discussion of corruption is extremely difficult as it is a hidden phenomenon in our societies. Both parties in exchange of power for privileges want to keep their transaction secret. That makes it so difficult to establish how wide and deep corruption penetrated our economy and social life. Moreover, what for some is no more than ‘a friendly turn’ is for others ‘misbehaviour’. What in one place can be friendliness is unacceptable elsewhere. Normal behaviour at a particular hour of the day may be unacceptable at another hour.

Let us have a look into some of the characteristics.

a) Recipients and payers.

b) Extortion.

c) Lubricant of society.

d) An ethical problem.

e) Poverty reduction.

f) Small is beautiful.

g) Culture.

h) ‘Kindness among friends’.

a) Recipients and payers

Corruption is the abuse of entrusted power and elected authority for private profit.

Worldwide complaints are heard about politicians and public officials who accept bribes and enrich themselves privately at the expense of the common citizen. This may be at the expense of the employee and the employer; consumer and producer; renter and tenant; the one applying for a permit to do something, or asking exemption from an obligation to pay or to deliver a product or a service. All those cases may be considered to be abuse of power and authority for one’s own benefit.

Complainers forget that necessarily there should also be payers who benefit from that abuse of power and authority. The other side of the coin shows payers assuming that their ‘gift’ to a politician or a public official, may in return deliver profitable preferential treatment or delivery.

Test Ask family, neighbours, colleagues at work, their opinion on this subject.
Do they support the opinion that it is wrong to bribe politicians and public officials, whereas, the other way round, they themselves bribing these officials for their own profit would not be wrong? Would they denounce someone bribing an official or politician?

b) Extortion

Many among us go one step further. They do not only blame politicians and public officials for willingly accepting bribes. They also often allege that those having authority in our society ask to be bribed or give us the opportunity to bribe. This means that the question ‘who is to blame’, shifts from the person who pays to the person who extorts and receives. Again on the ground of the allegation: ‘There’s no escaping from it, for if you don’t pay, you are bound to fall behind’.

Test: Ask yourself whether it is an easy way out of a personal problem to claim that you are not corrupt but that others force you to give bribes, expatriates buying their licenses claiming that the authorities are corrupt!

c) Lubricant of society

Many think that paying bribes is required to ensure smoother operation of society. They think that without an occasional gift (for example, around Christmas and New Year), or incidentally (a gift on the occasion of a marriage or when a child is born) for instance upon entering into a contract for the supply of a product or a service, such contracts might be lost to them and might be assigned to others.

For their own enterprises that would then amount to a loss, implying loss of sales potential, which is not what any enterprise or entrepreneur works for.

Test: did you ever refuse to pay a bribe, or would you if you had the potential to ask for a bribe, refuse to do so? Did you feel any consequences?

d) An ethical problem

The mere fact that both the payer and the recipient of bribes want to keep their behaviour secret (and often succeed in doing so as well) shows that such behaviour is generally considered to be improper. Many consider corruption to be an ethical problem, a behavioural problem. And refer to it as being ‘sinful’, a ‘wrongdoing’. It is a problem to be solved by means of personal ‘reform’.

Those who took the initiative to establish Transparency International (TI), the global coalition against corruption, in the last decade of the past century, began calling corruption ‘bad business practices’, which is a moral judgment, not an economical. On the contrary, some in the business community consider corruption to be ‘good business practices’, as they make more money using corruption as a business tool!

Corruption is an economic phenomenon with an ethical aura.

e) Poverty reduction.

Poverty in the world is often brought up to account for the phenomenon of corruption. Is that satisfactory? Is it correct and is it proven that the poor are more corrupt than the rich? How come then, that some political leaders, e.g. Suharto in Indonesia, Mobutu in Congo, and Abacha in Nigeria, but also Kohl in German and Mitterrand and Chirac in France, are or were so deeply implicated in bribery affairs? They can hardly be said to suffer poverty, can they? Neither can this be said from business leaders, often millionaires, if not billionaires, who are implicated in corruption affairs with those political leaders.

The explanation that refers to individual poverty reduction is especially given by those who have a keen eye for corruption among lower operational staff in government service, notably lower office clerks, police officers, customs officers, the military, teachers, admission staff in hospitals, bus ticket collectors, car-park attendants, garbage collectors, etc., who on an operational level often have good opportunities to extract extra income or privileges from decisions they might take of importance to entrepreneurs and citizens.  Consequently, these have a certain value.

f) Small is beautiful

In the OESO treaty, made for the purpose of fighting corruption, room has been left for citizens and businesses to make so-called ‘facilitating payments’. By that is meant any small payment to a public official for the purpose of somewhat expediting or easing a transaction, that in itself is in accordance with the rules and the law. The example that is always given to illustrate such a case is the transport of fresh vegetables. Is the payment of an insignificant amount of money to the customs officer who can speed up a border check on the perishable cargo in the truck or ship, allowed? He is not doing anything unlawful, he is doing what he has to do, but he does it a bit quicker or earlier.

Test: We all know similar examples from our own environment. Is someone attended without standing in line? Do you get a timely answer to your letter without waiting for that letter to reach the top of the pile of papers in front of the handling official? Do you convince the policeman to tear up the parking-ticket, what argument is strong enough to convince him that the ticket should not have been written?