Corruption is understood as everything from the paying of bribes to civil servants in return for some favour and the theft of public purses, to a wide range of dubious economic and political practices in which politicians and bureaucrats enrich themselves and any abusive use of public power to a personal end.
by Zulkifli Nazim
“When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men in a society, over the course of time they create for themselves a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it.” – Frederic Bastiat, French Economist.
The causes and effects of corruption, and how to combat corruption, are issues that have been very much on the national and international agendas of politicians and other policymakers in recent decades. Various historically influential philosophers like Plato (The Republic), Aristotle (The Politics), Machiavelli (The Prince and The Discourses) and Montesquieu (The Spirit of the Laws), have concerned themselves with political corruption in particular, in somewhat general terms. For these philosophers corruption consisted in large part, in rulers governing in the service of their own individual or collective—or other factional—self-interest, rather than for the common good, shamelessly misusing the legally enshrined moral principles
For most people in public policy circles, one suspects, the main problems surrounding corruption are practical. The concept itself is comparatively straightforward and concrete in connotation, referring to certain specific practices such as bribery, cronyism and nepotism. The harmfulness of such practices is taken as self-evident because they are obvious abuses of power. The only question is how to ‘stamp it out’.
Corruption is a disease, a cancer that eats into the cultural, political and economic fabric of society, and destroys the functioning of vital organs. It is found almost everywhere, but it is stubbornly entrenched and widespread in our beloved country. It is deep rooted and is reaching alarming proportions.
Generally, the conceptualisation of the term corruption has long been ideologically, morally, culturally, politically and intellectually elusive to the point of losing sight of its detrimental and parasitic symbiosis with many polities including Sri Lanka and citizens all over the world.
It has become severely endemic to public life in Sri Lanka through its terminal contamination; because Sri Lanka has far too many “political dinosaurs”, “tyrants” and “tropical gangsters” and, “far too few statesmen” as leaders, whose proclivity for shabby political goings-on like the “bleeding of the national economies for personal benefits”, is unequalled within the global political community.
Corruption is understood as everything from the paying of bribes to civil servants in return for some favour and the theft of public purses, to a wide range of dubious economic and political practices in which politicians and bureaucrats enrich themselves and any abusive use of public power to a personal end.
Corruption is dangerous and inimical to the systemic existence of any polity. It is a sociopolitical, economic and moral malaise that may permeate and cripple, as a result of its contagiousness and malignancy, the nerves of any polity. It is an intolerable characteristic that should be discouraged in governance because once it sets into any part, it automatically contaminates all the strata of that system’s multidimensional hierarchy.
“One rotten apple spoils the barrel”
The most popular explanation for corruption is that it’s the result of unscrupulous individuals; rotten apples that threaten to spoil the whole barrel. So what has to be done is to separate these apples from the rest through judicial means, fines and prison sentences. This diagnosis has some basis in reality because there are some, some-times a lot, of these rotten apples in our political institutions. However, it’s more likely that it’s the barrels that are causing the apples to rot; the case against the barrel could be extended to the warehouse – the parliament - where the barrels and the apples are kept,
Corruption has a long pedigree and, as a process, it has definitely threatened the existence of all governments. As a phenomenon, it runs deep in the life-line of all previous governments. Definitions of corruption have ranged from its typification as using of public or official positions in ways that forsake public interests; deviant behaviours that encourage private gains at public expense; maladjusted behaviours that flagrantly violate the acceptable and legitimized norms of societal expectations to its conceptualisation as spoiled, unethically polluted, and, rotten behaviours that diverge from the formal and expected role which the society demands of everybody.
Corruption involves the injection of additional and improper transactions aimed at changing the moral course of events and altering judgements and position of trust. It consists of the doers – “givers and receivers” use of informal, extra-legal or illegal acts to facilitate matters.
It is in this sense that one sees corruption as a lubricator of the social system, a means by which to overcome economic obstacles and bureaucratic red-tapism. It is generally regarded as a debasement of integrity.
When applied to human relations, corruption is an extremely bad influence, an injection of rottenness or decay; a decline in moral conduct and personal integrity attributable to venality - prostitution of talents and dishonesty.
When applied to public office, the practice has been to spell out specific acts of misconduct that disgrace public office and make the offenders unfit to remain in office”.
It has been recognized that anyone put into a position of exercising communal or collective or public power and commanding public obedience is tempted to use public office for personal gain and advantage. Corruption is described as a behavior that deviates from the formal rules of conduct governing the actions of public servants because of private-regarding motives such as wealth, power or status.
There are important ethical standards which individuals can reasonably be expected to uphold; breaching such standards for personal gain marks an abhorrent betrayal of public trust. Individual officials cannot be expected to set the standards for themselves and so are appropriately judged in terms of the rules set for them. This is not to say that the person concerned is wholly depraved or, more importantly, that the persons not so condemned are moral paragons.
Corruption is also defined as the moral incapacity of citizens to make reasonably disinterested commitments to actions, symbols and institutions which benefit the substantive common welfare. This extensive demise of loyalty to the country comes from the interaction of human nature with systematic inequality of wealth, power and status.
The corruption of the polity results in certain identifiable patterns of political conflict and competition. The central feature of these patterns is the emergence of quasi-governmental factions and an increasingly polarized class system. The politics of the factions leads to an undermining of the efficacy of the basic political structures of the society and the emergence of systematic corruption in all aspects of political life.
The disintegration of ordered arrangements of life is a central problem of politics. When the daily interactions among people and institutions no longer provide normal opportunities for the exercise of integrity, personal right, or fulfillment, the government and people can no longer ignore the decay. No one can get anything done in a government or local government institution. People are pushed from pillar to post and at the end of the day, those who went to seek redress go home disappointed.
The moral problem in corruption has been commonly referred to as “Cancer”. “Aids” or “The Root of all Evil”, that robs the poor and damages the moral of society; and the economic interpretation argues that unequal economic and power distributions have generated forces which have alienated the people and lead to the social breakdowns.
Here, in this article we do not seek to condemn people outright; but rather to find solutions. On the political, social and government level the solutions involve a solid rule of law, an independent and effective judicial system, independent and active media, transparent institutions and clear rules of the game, which are both understood and demanded by a well-educated public with ethical criteria and a sense of justice. But on top of this, the people of this country also have to make their contribution with a serious effort to avoid corruption in any form.
“The world will not be destroyed by those who do evil, but by those who watch them without doing anything.” – Albert Einstein
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