Around 80% of African people live on less than $2 a day, amongst other factors corruption has been labelled as one of the leading drivers perpetuating poverty in Africa. According to Jose Ugaz chairman of Transparency International " in too many countries people are deprived of their most basic needs and go to bed hungry every night due to corruption while the powerful and corrupt enjoy lavish lifestyles with impunity". This therefore calls for action to be taken to nip the bud of corruption before it becomes the norm or before it is the formal way of doing business in Africa.This post explores the possible solutions to eradicating corruption as proposed by the World bank.
Paying civil servants well
Whether civil servants are appropriately compensated or grossly
underpaid will clearly affect motivation and incentives. If public
sector wages are too low, employees may find themselves under pressure
to supplement their incomes in “unofficial” ways. Van Rijckeghem and
Weder (2001)
did some empirical work showing that in a sample of less developed
countries, there is an inverse relationship between the level of public
sector wages and the incidence of corruption.
2. Creating transparency and openness in government spending
Subsidies, tax exemptions, public procurement of goods and services,
soft credits, extra-budgetary funds under the control of politicians—all
are elements of the various ways in which governments manage public
resources. Governments collect taxes, tap the capital markets to raise
money, receive foreign aid and develop mechanisms to allocate these
resources to satisfy a multiplicity of needs. Some countries do this in
ways that are relatively transparent and make efforts to ensure that
resources will be used in the public interest. The more open and
transparent the process, the less opportunity it will provide for
malfeasance and abuse. Collier (2007)
provides persuasive evidence on the negative impact of ineffective
systems of budget control. Countries where citizens are able to
scrutinize government activities and debate the merits of various public
policies also makes a difference. In this respect, press freedoms and
levels of literacy will, likewise, shape in important ways the context
for reforms. Whether the country has an active civil society, with a
culture of participation could be an important ingredient supporting
various strategies aimed at reducing corruption.
New Zealand, which is consistently one of the top performers in Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index,
is a pioneer in creating transparent budget processes, having approved
in 1994 the Fiscal Responsibility Act, providing a legal framework for
transparent management of public resources.
3. Cutting red tape
The high correlation between the incidence of corruption and the extent
of bureaucratic red tape as captured, for instance, by the Doing Business
indicators suggests the desirability of eliminating as many needless
regulations while safeguarding the essential regulatory functions of the
state. The sorts of regulations that are on the books of many
countries—to open up a new business, to register property, to engage in
international trade, and a plethora of other certifications and
licenses—are sometimes not only extremely burdensome but governments
have often not paused to examine whether the purpose for which they were
introduced is at all relevant to the needs of the present.
Rose-Ackerman (1998) suggests that “the most obvious approach is simply to eliminate laws and programs that breed corruption.”
4. Replacing regressive and distorting subsidies with targeted cash transfers
Subsidies are another example of how government policy can distort
incentives and create opportunities for corruption. According to an IMF
study (2013),
consumer subsidies for energy products amount to some $1.9 trillion per
year, equivalent to about 2.5 percent of global GDP or 8 percent of
government revenues. These subsidies are very regressively distributed,
with over 60 percent of total benefits accruing to the richest 20
percent of households, in the case of gasoline. Removing them could
result in a significant reduction in CO2 emissions and generate other
positive spillover effects. Subsidies often lead to smuggling, to
shortages, and to the emergence of black markets. Putting aside the
issue of the opportunity costs (how many schools could be built with the
cost of one year’s energy subsidy?), and the environmental implications
associated with artificially low prices, subsidies can often put the
government at the center of corruption-generating schemes. Much better
to replace expensive, regressive subsidies with targeted cash transfers.
5. Establishing international conventions
Because in a globalized economy corruption increasingly has a
cross-border dimension, the international legal framework for corruption
control is a key element among the options open to governments. This
framework has improved significantly over the past decade. In addition
to the OECD’s Anti-Bribery Convention, in 2005 the UN Convention Against
Corruption (UNCAC) entered into force, and bylate 2013 had been ratified by the vast majority of its 140 signatories.
The UNCAC is a promising instrument because it creates a global
framework involving developed and developing nations and covers a broad
range of subjects, including domestic and foreign corruption, extortion,
preventive measures, anti-money laundering provisions, conflict of
interest laws, means to recover illicit funds deposited by officials in
offshore banks, among others. Since the UN has no enforcement powers,
the effectiveness of the Convention as a tool to deter corruption will
very much depend on the establishment of adequate national monitoring
mechanisms to assess government compliance.
Others (Heinemann and Heimann (2006))
have argued that a more workable approach in the fight against
corruption may consist of more robust implementation of the
anticorruption laws in the 40 states that have signed the OECD’s
AntiBribery Convention. Governments will need to be more pro-active in
cracking down on OECD companies that continue to bribe foreign
officials. In their efforts to protect the commercial interests of
national companies, governments have at times been tempted to shield
companies from the need to comply with anticorruption laws, in a
misguided attempt not to undermine their position vis-à-vis competitors
in other countries. Trade promotion should not be seen to trump
corruption control. Governments continue to be afflicted by double
standards, criminalizing bribery at home but often looking the other way
when bribery involves foreign officials in non-OECD countries.
6. Deploying smart technology
Just as government-induced distortions provide many opportunities for
corruption, it is also the case that frequent, direct contact between
government officials and citizens can open the way for illicit
transactions. One way to address this problem is to use readily
available technologies to encourage more of an arms-length relationship
between officials and civil society; in this respect the Internet has
been proved to be an effective tool to reduce corruption (Andersen et al., 2011).
In some countries the use of online platforms to facilitate the
government’s interactions with civil society and the business community
has been particularly successful in the areas of tax collection, public
procurement, and red tape. Perhaps one of the most fertile sources of
corruption in the world is associated with the purchasing activities of
the state. Purchases of goods and services by the state can be sizable,
in most countries somewhere between 5-10 percent of GDP. Because the
awarding of contracts can involve a measure of bureaucratic discretion,
and because most countries have long histories of graft, kickbacks, and
collusion in public procurement, more and more countries have opted for
procedures that guarantee adequate levels of openness, competition, a
level playing field for suppliers, fairly clear bidding procedures, and
so on.
Chile is one country that has used the latest technologies to create one
of the world’s most transparent public procurement systems in the
world. ChileCompra was launched in 2003, and is a public electronic
system for purchasing and hiring, based on an Internet platform. It has
earned a worldwide reputation for excellence, transparency and
efficiency. It serves companies, public organizations as well as
individual citizens, and is by far the largest business-to-business site
in the country, involving 850 purchasing organizations. In 2012 users
completed 2.1 million purchases issuing invoices totaling US$9.1
billion. It has also been a catalyst for the use of the Internet
throughout the country.
In many of the measures discussed above aimed at combating corruption,
the underlying philosophy is one of eliminating the opportunity for
corruption by changing incentives, by closing off loopholes and
eliminating misconceived rules that encourage corrupt behavior. But an
approach that focuses solely on changing the rules and the incentives,
accompanied by appropriately harsh punishment for violation of the
rules, is likely to be far more effective if it is also supported by
efforts to buttress the moral and ethical foundation of human behavior.
Corruption calls for every responsible citizen to take a step towards integrity.It is therefore up to every citizen to see to it that in their space of influence corruption is thwarted.It begins with you..Ini newe tine basa.Asante sana.
