Message-ID: <19990323051154.AAB15131@LOCALNAME> Date: Tue, 23 Mar 1999 01:16:06 -0004 From: Kerry Miller <mailto:kerryo@ns.sympatico.ca> Subject: Guardian: Not worth a shrug To: mailto:DEVEL-L@AMERICAN.EDU
http://www.guardianunlimited.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,3837287, 00.htmlNot worth a shrug
If you think corruption is a victimless crime, just try daily life in Tanzania
By Peter Preston March 15, 1999
So bribes and backhanders are just a way of doing export business, just a way of life. So exalted Saudis, via Swiss bank accounts, can strike it rich. So dole out your overseas 'commissions' skilfully enough, and the Revenue will make them tax deductible. So what? These, it seems, are necessary accommodations. This is the world of shrug and pay.
So pause, take a deep breath and turn with me the pages of the Warioba Report. While, back in Britain, you've shrugged through Mr Ayas, Mr Aitken and all that stuff, I've been following the debate from afar: from a suffering country its own citizens put in the premier division of global corruption. There is nothing to shrug about in Tanzania.
We can, almost without trying, kid ourselves that corruption is a kind of victimless crime. Inevitable, inexorable. Everybody's doing it, so everybody has to do it. Distant corruption is one price of providing jobs and profits in Birmingham, Bordeaux or Bremen. Judge Warioba knows better.
Almost three years ago (with a commission team built on Lawrence Inquiry lines) he lifted the lid on Tanzanian society. And found victims by the million. Do you want an X-ray or a hospital bed or an operation for a sick relative? You'll need to cross the palms of the doctors and the registrars first. (Eighty more of them face charges as I write.) Do you want a school place for your kid? Or a handy leak of an exam paper?
Bundles of notes, systematically documented in the Warioba pages, are not optional extras to ordinary life. They will see crooks protected by the police - and be demanded of the innocent as the price of release from a cell. They will buy you a tax holiday, forgive you a loan, get you a trading licence or a soft sentence in court. If you want land or a job (or water, or electricity) you must expect to pay. And cruelty and pain, of course, come umbilically attached. No money? No justice.
These, to be sure, are the crimes of the smaller fish, the poor playing parasite on the poor. They are endemic, affecting every tier of society day by day, a true way of life. Warioba understands the desperation that drives them. Thus he reserves his greatest ire for the bigger fish.
'Leaders who are supposed to make important national decisions are bribed by businessmen... they offer chairmanships and board directorships of (State) companies... without considering professional knowledge or ability. Chief executive officers receive bribes in order to breach tendering rules and regulations, to make various tax exemptions and to conclude construction contracts with private companies without due regard for the national interest'. The net is wide and full. Tip it out and the sluices teem with ministers, politicians, chairmen - wriggling with 'excessive greed'.
If Macpherson hadn't got there first, there would have been a name for all this. Institutional corruption. But it was not always thus. It began (Warioba says) in the early Seventies, as raging inflation and 'lackadaisical administration' tore apart the fragile fabric of Nyerere's welfare state. It was cemented into place at the beginning of the liberalising, privatising Nineties as business and 'corrupt leaders' joined forces for 'conspicuous consumption'.
And now? 'Whenever a citizen reports incidents of corruption amongst the lower cadres to the relevant leaders and senior officials, no action is taken - due either to the involvement of these leaders and officials in the corrupt practices, or because they no longer care about the people's social problems and see the problem as something normal'. Whistleblowers are routinely shopped to those they try to expose. They believe 'they will be persecuted by State Organs in collaboration with the accused'. Ordinary people believe 'they are obligated to give bribes in order to get justice or essential services'.
There is naught for your shrugging here. There is only a burning anger. Tanzania - like too many other countries in the Third World - is caught in an epidemic of corruption, an epidemic to go alongside Aids. The roads that should be built accrete mysterious costs as they run into the mud. The wealth that should trickle down never leaves the boardroom. The poor ask what they pay taxes for - because they never see any benefits.
It is, by the standards of other countries around, a peaceful place: without the violence of Kenya or the paranoid persecution of Zimbabwe. This could be a beacon for Africa. Its people are friendly and earnest and intelligent. They have hope for the future. They want and deserve to do much better. They seek release from the pall of corruption that has fallen over them.
But how, pray, is that to be done? President Mkapa's efforts to implement Warioba have waned in the face of intransigence from the very 'leaders' the commission wanted sacked: too powerful, too entrenched. Politicians fill in annual statements of 'personal wealth' - but somehow they never get published. The will for reform within the system is feeble: and outside, unsurprisingly, the flow of aid diminishes. Who wants to help the rich in their offices to grow richer still? Who will spray the lush lawns with more dollars?
I wandered the other day across a field on the edge of Dar es Salaam filled with women, young and old, squatting amid a pile of boulders and chopping them, by hand, into the smaller stones that would help lay a road or make a wall. That is what they do from dawn to dusk. They break up the stones. They probably had to offer a little bundle of shillings for the privilege. And it is not possible to pass them by.
Is British business to blame, if the word 'blame' has any meaning? Of course not. The business here is as international as Athens or Rome. It deals in the 'normality' that Warioba chronicles. It is merely a player - perhaps a hapless player - in the greater game. What goes around, comes around. What the Inland Revenue judges tax deductible may be routinely claimed.
The price of the game, though, is cripplingly high. It condemns those who are sick and destitute to die without medical treatment. It condemns those without pathetic bundles of notes to live beyond the reach of society. The game is one of cruel oppression. To shrug is to mock its malignity.
Would it help if our government tightened up its act, stopped the Revenue deductions, brought British law fully behind the new International Convention on Combating Bribery? It would help a little. It would give the system one more squeeze. Look again at the stone women in their field. Every little helps them, and the children they must somehow feed.
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