The recent spate of activity that lends to the perception that there is an ongoing active crackdown on corruption has various neutral observers saying there is no connection between corruption-busting, and the economy.
Why should there be a direct connection they ask? One prominent business tycoon whose day job seems to be making speeches in Parliament, recently said that crackdown on corruption doesn’t bring in investors or something to that effect.
It can be asked in this context why the most corrupt countries, are also the poorest. This is a verifiable fact. If people cannot be bothered looking for evidence on how corruption-crackdowns spur economic growth, they can go in the reverse direction and try to find out why nations with corrupt leaderships are always poor.
People could say that it is not that corrupt countries are poor, but that poor countries are corrupt. Isn’t it the same thing, though, it could be asked? The nuance and the subtlety, the experts would say, is that the poorer countries are more prone to be corrupt, and that there is nothing that can be done about it.
It is this reasoning that is promoting people of all sorts to come out of the woodwork to say that a crackdown on corruption is one thing, while working overtime to grow the economy is altogether something else.
The inference is that any crackdown on corruption is political, and is not genuinely targeted towards improving the country’s growth, and impacting people’s lives for the better.
They may as well argue that corruption should just as well be ignored. If taking-on the corrupt and the venal does not improve people’s economic prospects, couldn’t it be argued that corruption is par for the course in a modern capitalist democracy?
The civil society elite on the other hand seemed to be fixated on corruption and corruption-busting. However, in a way that was rather unexpected in this country that top level ex-ministers and politically appointed bureaucrats were handed stiff prison sentences recently. This seems to have the civil society establishment gobsmacked. Now, they seem to be saying that corruption busting will not solve economic problems.
Obviously, the country’s political culture was not geared to witness the phenomenon of an authentic crackdown on people’s representatives diddling State coffers and helping themselves to taxpayer money.
It seemed that some people had arrived at a point where they thought politicians are not worth their mettle if they didn’t steal. Politicians on the other hand seemed to make corruption and graft, a device by which they could project power.
The corrupt fattened themselves, and then they doled out patronage because they could buy people with money. They could buy public servants and ensure that political supporters were rewarded through the agency of these bureaucrats.
However, to find a direct correlation between a corruption crackdown and economic growth, the numbers need to be looked at. People take one look at countries that developed dramatically, and say that these nations progressed economically despite the fact that there was corruption. South Korea was an example. The country was one of the most corrupt in the Asian region, but as it progressed economically, corruption started becoming a thing of the past.
FRUGAL
Besides that, in South Korea, even dissipation, as was seen in recent history, was not for removed from dedication. Park Chung-hee, the South Korean President who is widely credited with engineering the country’s economic miracle, was shot dead while he was enjoying a sumptuous repast with some very young girls and close aides at a well-appointed residential facility used by the President.
When he passed away — shot to death by someone who was once one of his closest confidantes — people gradually discovered that he and his wife had led incredibly frugal lives. They hardly owned anything of significance, and the First Lady’s dresses were found to be darned, or knitted over for further use.
It seems that in this context, corruption busting in South Korea was not measurable in numbers so much. Also, not even excess was waste. As soon as corruption gradually subsided in the country, the economy received a boost in terms of people reposing confidence.
That’s the entire point in eradicating corruption. It is not an effort to shore up numbers immediately. However, sometimes the voter seems to think that corruption-busting is a magic wand.
That’s partly because electioneering slogans have dwelled on the fallacy that corruption is the sole cause of economic atrophy. Of course, corruption has to take a lot of the blame for economic retardation in developing country contexts. But there is a range of other factors that keeps economies such as ours down. These include a lack of confidence in long and short term economic policy, and over-regulation and inertia in the entrepreneurial sector.
However, politicians have dinned into the crowds, the notion that it is corruption alone that is keeping the economy in the dumps.
In this context, it is easy to discern the expectation among voters, that a campaign against corruption would instantly shore up economic statistics. That, of course, wouldn’t happen, because there is no instant redress just because the corrupt are snared and incarcerated.
But what does happen is that there is a dramatic change in the political culture. People begin to have more confidence in the system of oversight and in the bureaucratic establishment when they see justice being served on the culprits. They are gratified to see that the corrupt and the useless don’t thrive, while people who have worked hard to make a contribution fall by the wayside.
Today, we have the spectacle of civil society questioning the value of this transformation in the political culture. In effect, they seem to be saying that corruption is so much part of our social fabric that it is hard to believe that fighting it would have any substantial impact on economic improvement. In effect, they are saying, despite everything that has been said about corruption, in fact something else must be wrong with the country.
The other interpretation being given is that tackling corruption is political, while what’s actually needed is policy that directly creates economic growth. By making this delineation, the analysts seem to want to make any crackdown on corruption seem to be somewhat unserious, or tantamount to a political roadshow. What is revealing about this is that the experts did not play down the corruption issue when they were seeing rampant corruption, with hardly any effort to combat it.
It is almost as if sections of civil society thought they could make corruption the permanent weapon they could brandish against the political establishment. In other words, it is convenient and almost stylish to portray developing countries as being corrupt beyond redemption.
It fits the oversight-based agenda of various civil society organisations, to say the least.
Punishment
Today, however, there seems to be an effort to make punishment for diddling public finances a deterrent that would de-motivate both politicians and bureaucrats from pursuing easy-money schemes at the expense of the public at large.
This seems to be a shock the establishment finds difficult to take. Politics was an indulgence for a certain class of people, precisely because there were spoils.
What then is the point in engaging in a political career, if there is no money that can be extracted from the system? This poser must be turning a lot of folk who contemplated politics as a career path, away from that contemplated route.
Moonlighting business tycoons seem to say that they have a mantra that is even better than a corruption crackdown. This is as if to say, yes, catching thieves is good, but has it improved your lives?
It is also to infer that they can do something better even if they are corrupt. There dare seems to be, try us, because we are corrupt and, therefore, know how to rig the system for your benefit.
But people no longer buy the idea that the rich would rig the system to benefit the ordinary people. They know the wealthy rig the system to benefit themselves and themselves alone. The fairly tale of trickle-down thievery is no longer believed.
