BY MULUGETA GUDETA
The recent decision by the Ethiopian government to deal with the evil of corruption more effectively and with greater commitment could only be welcomed because the level of fraudulent activities have reached such an alarming degree, requiring urgent action to stem their nefarious manifestations and devastating consequences. As corruption in Ethiopia has spread in almost all sectors of activities, the fight against it also requires a collective and concerted approach by the major victims whose future is compromised by the evil acts it generates. In this sense, it can be said that corruption is no more a “normal” phenomenon but an abnormal national malaise that is eating away at the very core of society, almost becoming what we may call a social cancer and an economic security threat.
The culture of corruption is defined as, “attitudes, beliefs, and practices so pervasive as to make much of the population tolerant of corruption in public and private life and indifferent to anti-corruption reform through lack of confidence in the possibility of positive change.”
If we try to look at the situation in contemporary Ethiopia against the above definition, we realize that corruption has long become a culture embedded within societies both rural and urban as well as within the circles of both educated and uneducated members of society who consider it as normal day to day practice. In the past, there were several attempts to eradicate corruption from society although the methods and approaches were mostly dysfunctional and lacked enough determination to bring the job to its conclusion.
Corruption is not something that grows overnight and that can be eradicated overnight. As corruption developed through many decades if not centuries, it can only be effectively addressed by using various instruments like the legal system and education establishment to rid people of the mentality of looking at corruption as a normal feature of life. Corruption is not a normal exercise but a reflection of the depth of crisis a society has sunk without knowing or caring about its lethal consequences.
According to various studies conducted on corruption and its various manifestations, “Corruption can be defined and categorized in various ways. The most common types of categories of corruption are supply versus demand corruption, grand versus petty corruption, conventional versus unconventional corruption and public versus private corruption.”
According to the above definition, all the forms of manifestation of corruption are present in present day Ethiopia. A typical example of supply versus demand corruption is the category that is actually, although partially responsible for the ongoing inflation in the prices of goods and commodities. This is the type of corruption generated by a culture of scarcity or poverty, when people pay the price they are asked for goods and services that are scarce or cannot be found easily in the market. We have now both petty and grand corruption.
Petty corruption was prevalent in the past when the country was poorer and grand corruption largely emerged during the so-called accelerated economic development of the last decade or so. While petty corruption can affect the common people, grand corruption is undermining government-sponsored economic projects and performances. Corruption is sometimes related to poverty but the reality is different. At least in Ethiopia, corruption was less threatening when the country was poorer because there was not much resource to be shared or claimed by its citizens at all a level.
Corruption can also take different forms according to other studies,that concluded that, “forms of corruption may vary but can include bribery, lobbying, extortion, cronyism, nepotism, parochialism, patronage, influence peddling graft and embezzlement.” All these forms of corruption are prevalent in Ethiopia although their degrees of manifestation may be different from those in developed countries.
Corruption is considered a universal phenomenon. Countries may have different levels of corruption but there is no country in the world that is totally free from corruption which is apparently inherent in human behavior. People everywhere seem to be trying to take advantage of scarce resources by any means available including corruption. Yet, corruption becomes problematic when it involves powerful political and economic interest groups that are bent to take undue advantage of their positions in society to claim benefits that should not accrue to them by using various visible and invisible or subtle methods of bribing their way to success.
A bird’s eye view of the history of corruption would suggest that the above definitions fit very well into the structural manifestations and nature of corruption in Ethiopia. Corruption can be manifested in person to person transactions or within various groups in different communities.
Corruption is believed to have been present in Ethiopian society ever since the relations between the more powerful members of the communities and those who lived from hand to mouth was established back in the centuries-old times of feudalism. The impoverished peasants were often forced to pay regular dues to the feudal lords in addition to presenting them with diverse consumer items like goats and sheep in their bid to get things done in their communities or legal cases handled in their favor. During those times, it was neither a crime nor a shame to give judges and officials what was then called ejmensha (gifts) to the village officials as rewards for this or that favor.
These same acts came to be known as bribes later on when they were presented to the officials in the form of money donations as money barely started to penetrate into traditional communities. As the money offers grew in size and importance they were handled in secret and outside public view while the rest of society was looking the other way as the old ejmensha turned into gubbo (bribe) and the act came to be slowly recognized as illegal, criminal if not immoral.
Bribe giving and bribe taking, to inseparable faces of the same phenomenon, grew by leaps and bounds during the imperial rules of Haile Sellassie as the economic stakes were high and the bribe takers were eager to make additional incomes from their immoral and criminal activities. Modernity brought with it all the evils of developed societies where social advancement, jobs and officials positions as well as social recognitions came on the heels of a well-oiled system of bribery or corruption as an established practices. Nowadays, winning top government posts, including the presidency in Western countries are unthinkable without passive financial expenditures that amount to sort of buying the offices. And this is considered a normal practice for winning top posts in government.
In Ethiopia taking and giving bribes became social anomalies when the gap between the haves and have-not widened too much and the have-nots failed to honor their promises and instead started to rebel and refuse to pay their dues to the feudal lords and their hangers on during the long decades of feudal administration. This may be the basic reason that led to the February 1974 revolution in Ethiopia that considered paying bribes to state officials a crime that needed to be dealt with by “revolutionary actions”, an euphemism for long imprisonment or the death sentence.
Socialism in Ethiopia was expected to do away with such criminal activities as taking bribes in return for some form of official favor that should be met without monetary gratification. Past experiences have amply demonstrated that punishment is no remedy for corruption as top officials are likely to bribe their way out of prison or pay the legally authorities handsomely in order to incentive them to overturn their rulings.
Neither could we overcome corruption by building an “egalitarian society” whereby everybody is poor enough to live within their financial or material means. Such a society was not only the ideal social organization but also impossible to realize simply because competition for scarce resources legally or illegally was inherent in human nature as well as in human organizations.
In the last three or four decades, the growth and spread of corruption was recognized as the most toxic influence in society against the development aspiration of the people as a whole. Consequently governments started to address the menace in a clear and politically committed way although the levels of commitment carried from one government to another.
In the meantime, corruption assumed new forms starting as small bribes given to petty officials to grand corruption that involved high government officials. The culture of corruption spread like wildfire because of the number of people claiming underserved gains grew as the general level of competency declined an a merit system would not be established against the resistance of entrenched interest groups. Corrupt practices continued to grow, involving institutions that were otherwise considered incorruptible such as higher educational institutions where grades and degrees were exchanged against money or any other form of corrupt practice.
Meanwhile, corruption continued to grow to such an extent that it hampered or sabotaged development projects, forced resources to flow into the most wasteful channels and officials allegedly continued to claim money donations and favoritism for works that they were hired to do in exchange for salaries they collect every month. Meanwhile the definition of corruption came to include, gains illegally made for activities officials should perform freely as employees of the government.
The Amharic name for corruption also underwent new changes. It is sometimes called lebenet (theft) . For some people this terminological change is unacceptable because corruption which is called mussena in Amharic is more serious, more devastating and more threatening than theft. Whether you call it by any other name, the rose is a rose and cannot change its good smell. By the same token and despite the terminological twists and turns, corruption remains an evil culture that is festering in society and whose foul smell reaches deep into the highest levels of business and politics.
Suffice it to turn to Wikipedia’s description of corruption in Ethiopia to support our contentions. “There are various sectors in Ethiopia where businesses are particularly vulnerable to corruption. Land distribution and administration is a sector where corruption is institutionalized and facilitation payments as well as bribes are often demanded from businesses when they deal with land-related issues.”
This is a fair and short description of the malaise and this is of course the tip of the iceberg.
The Ethiopian Herald November 26/2022
