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Kathmandu Monday February 25, 2002 Falgun 13, 2058.
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Corruption and good governance
By SANJAY PRAKASH
Earlier, people earned to live; now they live
to earn. Obviously, the transformed attitude has pushed the ethics of an individual out of
its own reach. To achieve the sole objective of earning money, to satisfy their
never-ending desires, people use short-cuts. Once the individual takes to the short-cuts,
paved by fraudulent activities, he becomes deaf to the voice of his conscience. It is not
that people are unaware of their acts but there is a basic difference between knowing a
thing and understanding it. So ultimately one is trapped in the web of short-cuts or the
all-powerful "money".
>From the development perspective,
corruption can be considered a two-way street so far as the donor and recipient countries
interface is concerned. Very often scandals of graft have been disclosed. Yet, graft is
not possible without collusion among giant private corporations and public agencies,
foreign contractors, or consultants. Sometimes, such activity is associated with foreign
aid. Foreign companies practically argue that bribery is nothing but one of the costs of
doing business in a country. What can be done about these circumstances poses a challenge
not only to the aid recipient government but also to donors.
This connection the recommendations for both
recipient as well as donors are: simplify the rules, reduce unnecessary regulations, rely
more on market forces, insist upon meeting the procurement and contracting standards;
ensure laws that make it mandatory to meet auditing requirements, study audit reports, and
pay attention to the manner in which the disbursements are handled. The World Bank has
become particular about these points. Despite the above safeguards, the problems are still
daunting. Therefore, donors have a specific responsibility to ensure that commercial
considerations do not undermine good economic management in developing countries.
Encouraging governments to come up with sound public investment programmes and priority is
important. The donor’s contributions can be meaningful if recipient countries are
prepared to listen. In many cases, recipients blame donors when assistance programmes fail
to achieve the intended results. This is not fair. It is the recipient country’s
responsibility to make sound strategies for aid programmes based on a comprehensive study
beforehand. This calls for thorough homework that analyses and anticipates detailed end
results.
Eradicating corruption at all levels in the
Nepalese bureaucracy should become a basic concern for political leaders as well as
bureaucrats. Corruption can be reduced by practising greater transparency. For this, the
role of the people is equally pivotal. More importantly, people’s support for
eliminating corruption can be attained only when political leaders are deeply imbued with
a sense of integrity, responsibility and sacrifice.
Recently, the donor community, on their part,
raised concern over issues including crisis in governance, rampant corruption and poor
implementation of development projects. They also urged the government to trim the size of
the bureaucracy to reduce soaring government expenditure. The government’s reform
agenda rests on the commitments made at the NDF in Paris in April 2000. The proposed
priority actions involve initiatives in macro-economic stability, civil service reform,
anti-corruption initiatives, decentralisation, financial sector reform, private sector
development, aid effectiveness and the role of society in development.
Sometimes corruption is home-grown but all
too often international business corporations are seen to have bribed political leaders
and public officials in other countries or funded political parties in a way which
threatens the proper working of the democratic process.
The prime concern is with ‘the misuse of
public power for private benefit,’ often called grand corruption. Grand corruption
usually involves the giving of a benefit to a political leader or senior public official
by a businessman in return for a decision in his favour. It is usually something that the
leader should not do and that is also likely to be illegal.
All acts of corruption exhibit the following
characteristic: They involve more than one person, on the whole, they involve secrecy
except in situations where they have become so rampant and deep rooted that some powerful
individuals or those under their protection would not bother to hide their activities;
they involve an element of mutual obligation and mutual benefit; those who engage in them
usually attempt to camouflage their activities by resorting to some sort of lawful
justification. They avoid open clash with the law; those involved in them want definite
decisions from those who are able to influence those decisions; they involve betrayal of
trust; they involve contradictory dual functions of those committing the act; and they
violate the norm of duty and responsibility within the civic order. These acts can broadly
be classified into three categories: extortion, nepotism and bribery.
There are those who believe that corruption
has positive consequences for society. In many developing and least developed countries,
for example, corrupt practices serve as a means by which
the western inspired bureaucracy and administrative systems are reconnected to indigenous
realities and adopted to the every day lives of the people. For one acts of corruption
sometimes function as redistribute mechanisms which allow the disadvantaged groups in a
society to gain access to and avail of the required goods and services from the
government. They serve as means to assimilate into the political system those who would
otherwise be excluded by the legal system.
For the most part, however, corruption is
simply a means to cope with and survive the complex requirements and stringent impositions
of an alien bureaucracy. On the part of the corrupt party, for example, bribery is simply
a more efficient and probably much safer means of gaining access to productive and
subsistence resources they need than committing acts of violent resistance. On the part of
the corrupt civil servants, on the other hand, soliciting money or gifts from those
seeking favours is far easier than applying for loans from their respective agencies.
The revenue service is more lucrative among
the government services. As it has been said Kar ma basyo ghar baninchha. Bhansar ma
basiyo bhane sansar baninchha (If you work in the Tax Office, you will build a house,
while in the customs you can make your own world).
The negative effects of corruption on society
as a whole far outweigh the short-term benefits it allows to some sectors of society,
however. The undermining effects it has on the allocative and distributive functions of
the state translate to undelivered goods and services to the sectors that need them the
most.
Corrupt practices distort the distribution of
opportunities in favour of the more powerful and more influential members of society.
If bureaucratic corruption is a coping
mechanism that evolve out of the need to reconnect the bureaucracy to the realities of the
day-to-day existence of people in society, how did it evolve over time? How can the social
problem of corruption be resolved? First, we have to recognise that social norms and value
systems are accumulated experiences of successful collective coping mechanisms over time.
As such, they are more difficult to change just to suit an alien notion of what an ideal
public administrative system should be.
This being the case, efforts should be
undertaken towards reorienting government administrative practices to make them suitable
to the prevailing norms and values rather than the other way round. It is only when the
government bureaucracy could prove and assert its role as the protector of the collective
sentiment of the members of society that efforts to address corruption could actually be
more successful. As such the following strategy for controlling corruption can be
recommended: honesty should flow from top down, and create an atmosphere under which the
chances for indulging in corrupt practices are kept down to the minimum. While doing so,
if there is corruption, the corrupt should be taken to the courts for punishment. Both
curative and preventive measures should be adopted and implemented accordingly.
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