Last week Karomoja affairs minister Mary Goretti Kitutu was charged in the Anti-corruption court and spent the Easter weekend in Luzira.
This
happened because she was the alleged mastermind of the Karamoja iron sheets
scam that has held our attention over the last few weeks. Minister Kitutu, it has
been reported, dished out hundreds of iron sheets meant as relief aid for
Karamoja, to her well-heeled minster colleagues and other senior government officials,
who among other things used the sheets to roof their animal pens.
This
column has had a thing or two to say about corruption since it begun almost 20
years ago. Looking through the archives I came across this gem (If I may say so
myself) from September 2014 which run under this very headline, in which I tried
to put this whole corruption thing in perspective.
Beyond
showing that the more things change the more things stay the same, a less
cynical me thought there was hope for the anti-corruption fight, with a hopeful
ending that I think has been overtaken by events. You will be the judge.
Read
on dear reader.
What is corruption? Corruption is the
employment of public goods for personal enrichment.
Or maybe we should add, employment
of public goods for personal, family and friends’ enrichment.
By this definition corruption goes
beyond stealing money, but will include employing company facilities – using
official cars to ferry charcoal or official computers to do private
consultancies or official time to do private errands.
To complete the definition we
might add, corruption is the employment of public/company goods for personal,
family and friends’ enrichment. And you can be sure we have not covered all the
bases.
Corruption comes from a
misalignment of ambitions between the government officials and the public or
between the employees and shareholders or clients. If you can align those two
ambitions, corruption need not exist. I think.
The theory is that governments are
in place to improve the welfare of their people, be it in terms of improved
security, services and infrastructure. Generally governments are, or should be,
in the business of creating a conducive environment for their people, to not
only survive but thrive.
It is not automatic.
"For government to execute its mandate, its bureaucracy needs to one, appreciate the end goal and two, make their own personal ambitions subservient to this overarching goal...
Without the latter it will matter
little if everyone understands the former.
So, under what circumstances do
personal greed override the well-meaning intentions of the government?
It progresses slowly but increases
in pace as more and more people are roped into the scam.
It starts when the bar of what is
considered corrupt is raised. One minister famously complained that he had only
eaten a few hundreds of thousands of dollars when others had eaten more. That
the press should stop witch-hunting him!
Proceeds on to when public
officials get away with more and more without getting caught. When we hear
official so-so and the other have stolen billions of shillings, it rarely is the
case that they did it in one fell sweep. Often times the stolen billions are
the cumulative effect of years of “hard” work.
And then when the bosses start
co-opting subordinates in their shady deals.
The story is told of former Zaire
now Democratic Republic of Congo president Mobutu Ssese SSeko. Whenever he
wanted some money from the central bank he would send his personal assistant
with a note for say $10,000, the personal assistant would trot over to the
central bank, but only after adding a zero to the request to make it $100,000.
The central bank governor would unlock the vaults, but only after
adding his own zero to make it $1,000,000.
So at the end Mobutu pocketed his
$10,000 (maybe even tipped his PA $100!), the PA got $90,000 and the central
bank boss got $900,000. Makes you wonder whether Mobutu was truly the richest
man in Zaire.
And finally, the institution
becomes a machine for the promotion of private enrichment for its officials. It
may even hire out its competence to people outside.
Of course, the logical conclusion
to all this is that eventually the government is captured, it forgets its
original raison d’etre and becomes a free-for-all-but-the-people eating spree.
By this time even inserting your
most upright citizens to cause a clean-up is an exercise in futility, as the
“eating” networks are so pervasive and coordinated, that the most righteous
individual will soon be subsumed by the sheer magnitude of the racket.
And the people?
Well, they will get a few crumbs
when the officials charge down to the village in government monster four-wheel
drives or pay fees in decrepit schools, in a bad state because they do not get
enough funding from the government or a few contributions for weddings, whose
standards have been blown out of all reasonableness by the example of these
thieving officials' own parties.
"Actually, the worst thing that can happen is not that the government becomes a machine feeding off the people’s sweat for the enrichment of the few. The worst thing that can happen is that the whole population – the thieves and victims, slowly but with increasing pace accept this state of affairs as the new normal....
When your brightest minds clamour for government jobs over the private sector,
where the jobs are more enriching – in the sense of professional development
and advancement, you know all is lost.
Thankfully that last part has not
happened in Uganda. Not yet!
