Maravi

We all should fight corruption

We all should fight corruption
By The Post
Mon 25 July 2011, 14:00 CAT

The call to seriously get involved in fighting corruption made by Fr Kennedy Katongo, the Parochial Vicar of St Michael’s Church in Kalabo, who is also chairman of the Justice, Peace and Integrity Creation of the Mission of Mary Immaculate in Zambia, deserves very careful attention from every one of us.

Corruption in all its manifestations is a dehumanising evil force that must be fought with all the energy that we can muster. When we talk about corruption, we need to understand that it is not only the receiving of bribes by those in authority that amounts to corruption. Any form of abuse of power is corruption. A refusal to be accountable to the people on whose behalf one exercises his power is corruption. We say this because the consequences of all these activities are the same. Whether one takes a bribe or merely abuses their power by refusing to be accountable, the usual end result is that our people pay the price and are poorer as a result. It is said that corruption is an unjust tax on society which, unfortunately, particularly penalises the poor.

We need to stop and ask ourselves why everything is so expensive in our country. We know that we are not the only country where the cost of living is very high. But there is something wrong with the high cost of almost everything that we are forced to live with. It does not matter what you are talking about; you could be buying goods or paying for services. The problem is everywhere. Our country is an expensive place to live in. There could be some legitimate economic explanations for this problematic phenomenon, but we would like to suggest that corruption and its offshoots might well provide the clearest explanation of why things are so expensive in our country. In other words, those who engage in corruption are making the lives of the rest of us exceedingly miserable. By their corruption, they are punishing the rest of us. What is unfortunate is that sometimes, many of our people fail to make the connection between the misery that they experience and the corruption of those in authority. In this regard, we agree with Fr Katongo when he says we all should consciously and seriously get involved in fighting corruption because this is the only way we can improve things for ourselves. It does not help anyone to think that somebody is going to come from somewhere to resolve this problem for us.

Corruption is a cancer that must be uprooted from society. If we fail to do so, we begin, as we have been warned by Fr Katongo, to accept corruption as normal. Some people might say nobody can ever accept corruption as normal. But this is something that is happening as we speak today. There are many of our people who think that it is acceptable for leaders to steal and illegitimately benefit from their offices. Those who fail to do this and come out of public office the same way they went in are regarded as being dull, lacking initiative and intelligence. This is the dehumanising face of corruption.

The people who are being abused by their corrupt leaders learn to accept it as normal.

But if that was the only problem, we might probably be able to live with it. That is, if the only problem was that people accept corruption as normal and it ends there, then the problem would probably be containable. But that is not possible. Corruption is a cancer that eats the very foundation of normal existence in a society.

Fr Katongo has said that corruption undermines the core values of good governance, which are accountability and transparency. He has also said that corruption does not show respect to the common good of citizens, thereby retarding development. This is the problem that we all need to realise. If you eat at the core values of decent common existence as we have been warned, you begin to produce a state of anarchy. Society degenerates to a point where the abnormal becomes normal. This is what explains why the government sometimes forgets that it is its duty to ensure that citizens receive all the services that are required for a decent living. When you listen to them, they speak as though there is somebody else who is responsible for looking after the people they lead. Why should a leader behave in this irresponsible way? The answer should be clear to all of us. If you allow corruption, as we have in our country, to eat at accountability and remove the need for transparency, then why should a leader feel the necessity of delivering services to the people when he can look after his own interests regardless of whether the people are provided for or not?

The lack of accountability and transparency which is facilitated by a culture of corruption explains the indifference that our leaders have towards public opinion. They don’t care whether what they are doing is something that our people accept or not. They do not care that in doing what they claim to be doing for the people, they should be able to demonstrate that it has been done at arm’s length without any undue benefit to themselves. Instead of leading the people and making their lives better, those who lead become expensive parasites whose survival is dependent on their continued abuse of the people on whose behalf they claim to work. This is the problem of corruption.

There are many things in our country today that are impossible to explain without factoring in corruption. Why should our fuel, for instance, be consistently the most expensive in the region? Is it plain economics at play or is someone playing with our pockets?

There is also that question of the cost of doing business in Zambia which has become the favourite subject for many a conference. Why is it so expensive to do business in Zambia? In certain instances, we are even more expensive than war-torn areas.

There is a question of our leaders remaining stubborn when our people express disquiet over the things that they are doing. Rupiah Banda has had the audacity to brag that he is stubborn, but when Patrick Mwanawasa calls him stubborn, he is accused of insulting him. Why should a leader brag about being stubborn if his job is to deliver services to the people? Who is he accountable to? Could it be that he is more accountable to his pockets that the people he claims to serve?

There are still many questions to be answered about the Zamtel transaction. There is also the story of the air navigation radar at Lusaka International Airport which was supposed to be fixed in a few days but is still not working to this day. Who is fooling who? What about Rupiah’s stubbornness about the nonsensical mobile hospitals? Rupiah pushed ahead to spend millions of dollars on mobile hospitals when the country has been unable to maintain fixed infrastructure that generally should last longer.

Why this insistence? Why the refusal to be accountable? What about the lack of transparency in the process? This is why we must agree with Fr Katongo that unless we all act to fight corruption, we shall be engulfed by it.

Labels: CORRUPTION

posted by MrK @ 6:04 PM