Summary
·
The best
thing a thieving public office can do is understanding the league in which the
play
The Controller and Auditor General (CAG) report for the financial year 2021/2022, like many other
reports from years gone by, made for a very depressing reading. For someone who rarely betrays her poker face in public when angry, President Samia Suluhu Hassan was visibly livid.The script is the same: there is a
chorus of condemnations and calls for stern, legal actions to be taken against
alleged thieving cartels.
Not to be the bearer of bad news,
but nothing significant will change for the better anytime soon. For the past
fourteen years since the current arrangement was put in place, with three
different presidents in charge of the country, not once were CAG reports for
the faint-hearted.
Each successive year, the picture
painted is that of a changing cast but the underlying rot was here to stay.
Some few things could explain this perpetual state of affairs.
The Vietnamese have a saying; that a
house leaks from the roof. Since the return of multiparty politics in 1992, every
election is considered to be a ‘harvest season’ by voters.
Reports after reports point to
allegations of endemic corruption and other forms of financial malpractices
which cast long shadows of doubts on the class of leaders elected. These are
supposed to be the best a society can offer to lead the rest but the reality is
anything but that.
However, neither voters nor those
voted into office are under any illusion of what is expected of them. It is a
transactional relationship. CAG reports point to countrywide networks of
looters and plunderers of public resources.
The best thing a thieving public
official can do is understanding the league in which they play, because that
comes with a degree of protection that can be afforded to those who are better
connected.
A single individual cannot inflate
an invoice from $ 37 million to $ 86 million or disappear into the sunset with
Sh 4.8/- billion.
Geoffrey Chaucer, an English poet
wondered “That if gold rust, what then will iron do?” These leaders are
expected to be the gold of a society but rise to their positions with countless
blemishes. As such the bigger the carcass of public loot, chances are those
involved will never be held accountable for their (in)actions.
There is a long list of
politically-connected mega corruption scandals of nearly the last three decades
where there is no doubt that taxpayers lost dizzying amounts of their taxes but
for some reason not a single individual was held accountable for anything.
Worst outcomes were those which
puzzled Ayi Kwei Armah in his novel, The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born, where
the same small net captures small fish but is remarkably elastic when it comes
to big fish, which pass through.
There is also a fact that the
reports are based on certain benchmarks.
This boils down to lack of any
correlation between a district council’s ‘clean certificate’ and the quality of
services offered.
Each time ordinary people are
surveyed about the most corrupt public institutions or departments, they point
to those which are closest to them; those which affect their daily lives like
courts of law, the police, land departments or hospitals and health centres.
The focus of those who join the
public service is rarely about offering their services but doing their best to
make it in life in the shortest time possible. Social norms pamper those who,
as the Ugandans would put it, “fall into things”; that is become rich all of a
sudden after joining public service. Parents and guardians are keen for their
children to take certain courses at university or be employed in certain public
institutions. There is little attention paid to the quality of their services.
While Mwalimu Nyerere’s Ujamaa ethos
and its puritanism surface from time to time, its ghosts have not been powerful
enough to deter the culture of selfish pursuits, of greed where those in the
public service prioritize their own desires and needs and of those close or around
them than national interests.
It is for this reason that the
country continues to battle the cancer of corruption.
There are many development projects
across the country which have stalled despite money being paid upfront to
contractors, and in some instances the amount is inflated.
A good place to start earnestly
would be to depoliticize the institutions which deal with corruption by making
them independent of political influence. Minor and incremental reforms won’t
cut it.
Politicians must first let go for
the rats on board to sink.
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