eBusiness Weekly
Dr Gift Mugano
President Mnangagwa in his State of the Nation Address (SONA) highlighted the need to deal with corruption as one of the ten points the Government must be seized with. True to his observation, corruption has manifested itself in Zimbabwe like cancer in the bone marrow.
Corruption continues to damage the social and institutional fabric of Zimbabwe. From the look of things, it seems this disease is getting worse day by day.
In line with the call by the President to stop corruption, this week’s discussion focuses on reform options open to the Government to reduce corruption and mitigate its effects.
In doing this, I will focus on a two-pronged strategy aimed at increasing the benefits of being honest and the costs of being corrupt, a sensible combination of reward and punishment as the driving force of reforms. This is a vast subject.
However, major strategies which are tried and tested internationally include political will to deal with corruption, paying civil servants in line with capacity of Government, creating transparency and openness in Government spending, cutting red tape, removing distorting subsidies, establishing international conventions and deploying smart technology.
Paying civil servants well, whether they are appropriately compensated or grossly underpaid will clearly affect motivation and incentives.
If public sector wages are too low, employees may find themselves under pressure to supplement their incomes in illegal ways.
Empirical evidence showing from a sample of less developed countries, shows that there is an inverse relationship between the level of public sector wages and the incidence of corruption.
For Zimbabwe, under tight fiscal space this is a mammoth task. Measures proposed by the minister of finance to reduce the public sector wage bill to around 40 percent of the total budget coupled with measures aimed at raising fiscal revenue from the informal sectors and small and medium enterprises will go a long well in creating fiscal space to pay civil servants well.
With respect to creating transparency and openness in Government spending, subsidies, tax exemptions, public procurement of goods and services, soft credits, extra-budgetary funds under the control of politicians — are all elements of the various ways in which governments manage public resources.
Governments collect taxes, tap the capital markets to raise money, receive foreign aid and develop mechanisms to allocate these resources to satisfy a multiplicity of needs.
Some countries do this in ways that are relatively transparent and make efforts to ensure that resources will be used in the public interest.
The more open and transparent the process, the less opportunity it will allow for malfeasance and abuse. Studies show ineffective systems of budget control have negative impact on the economy.
Countries where citizens are able to scrutinise Government activities and debate the merits of various public policies also make a difference.
In this respect, press freedoms and levels of literacy will, likewise, shape in important ways the context for reforms. Whether the country has an active civil society, with a culture of participation could be an important ingredient supporting various strategies aimed at reducing corruption.
New Zealand, which is consistently one of the top performers in Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index, is a pioneer in creating transparent budget processes, having approved in 1994 the Fiscal Responsibility Act, providing a legal framework for transparent management of public resources.
On red tape, there is high correlation between the incidence of corruption and the extent of bureaucratic red tape as captured, for instance, by the Doing Business indicators, which suggests the desirability of eliminating as many needless regulations while safeguarding the essential regulatory functions of the state.
The sorts of regulations that are on the books of many countries — to open up a new business, to register property, to engage in international trade, and a plethora of other certifications and licenses — are sometimes not only extremely burdensome but governments have often not paused to examine whether the purpose for which they were introduced is at all relevant to the needs of the present.
The most obvious approach based on international experience is simply to eliminate laws and programmes that breed corruption.
There is need to replace regressive and distorting subsidies with targeted cash transfers, subsidies are another example of how government policy can distort incentives and create opportunities for corruption.
According to an IMF study, consumer subsidies for energy products amount to some $1,9 trillion per year, equivalent to about 2,5 percent of global GDP or 8 percent of Government revenues. These subsidies are very widely distributed globally, with over 60 percent of total benefits accruing to the richest 20 percent of households, in the case of gasoline.
Removing them could result in a significant reduction in carbon dioxide emissions and generate other positive spillover effects.
Subsidies often lead to smuggling, shortages, and to the emergence of black markets. Putting aside the issue of the opportunity costs (how many schools could be built with the cost of one year’s energy subsidy?) and the environmental implications associated with artificially low prices, subsidies can often put the Government at the centre of corruption-generating schemes. Much better to replace expensive, regressive subsidies with targeted cash transfers.
Establishing international conventions, because in a globalised economy corruption increasingly has a cross-border dimension, the international legal framework for corruption control is a key element among the options open to Governments.
This framework has improved significantly over the past decade. In addition to the OECD’s Anti-Bribery Convention, in 2005 the UN Convention Against Corruption (UNCAC) entered into force, and by late 2013 had been ratified by the vast majority of its 140 signatories.
The UNCAC is a promising instrument because it creates a global framework involving developed and developing nations and covers a broad range of subjects, including domestic and foreign corruption, extortion, preventive measures, anti-money laundering provisions, conflict of interest laws, means to recover illicit funds deposited by officials in offshore banks, among others.
Since the UN has no enforcement powers, the effectiveness of the convention as a tool to deter corruption will very much depend on the establishment of adequate national monitoring mechanisms to assess Government compliance.
Deploying smart technology, just as government-induced distortions provide many opportunities for corruption, it is also the case that frequent, direct contact between government officials and citizens can open the way for illicit transactions.
One way to address this problem is to use readily available technologies to encourage more of an arms-length relationship between officials and civil society; in this respect the internet has proved to be an effective tool to reduce corruption.
In some countries the use of online platforms to facilitate governments’ interactions with civil society and the business community has been particularly successful in the areas of tax collection, public procurement, and red tape.
Perhaps one of the most fertile sources of corruption in the world is associated with the purchasing activities of the state.
Purchases of goods and services by the state can be sizable, in most countries it accounts for between 5-10 percent of GDP. Because the awarding of contracts can involve a measure of bureaucratic discretion, and because in most countries have long histories of graft, kickbacks, and collusion in public procurement, more and more countries have opted for procedures that guarantee adequate levels of openness, competition, a level playing field for suppliers, fairly clear bidding procedures, and so on.
Chile is one country that has used the latest technologies to create one of the world’s most transparent public procurement systems in the world. Chile Compra was launched in 2003, and is a public electronic system for purchasing and hiring, based on an Internet platform.
It has earned a worldwide reputation for excellence, transparency and efficiency. It serves companies, public organizations as well as individual citizens, and is by far the largest business-to-business site in the country, involving 850 purchasing organizations.
In 2012, users completed 2,1 million purchases issuing invoices totalling $9,1 billion. It has also been a catalyst for the use of the Internet throughout the country.
The Government of Singapore was able to defeat corruption with effective administration and good governance.
Alongside the statutory measures dealing with perpetrators of corruption, a proactive approach to curb corruption was adopted in the Government. With the full support of parliament and the heads of Government departments, strict rules and regulations have been formulated to govern the conduct of public officers. A high standard of discipline is demanded of these officers such as:
(a) Public officers cannot borrow money from any person who has official dealings with them;
(b) Public officers’ unsecured debts and liabilities cannot at anytime be more than three times their monthly salary;
(c) Public officers cannot use any official information to further their private interests;
(d) Public officers are required to declare their assets at their first appointment and then annually;
(e) Public officers cannot engage in trade or business or undertake any part-time employment without approval; and
(f) Public officer cannot receive entertainment or a present in any form from members of the public.
The commitment of ministers and Heads of Government departments similarly resulted in the establishment of administrative measures to reduce the chances of public officers getting involved in corruption and wrongdoings.
These measures include:
(a) Identifying and removing opportunity for corruption in government work procedures;
(b) Streamlining cumbersome administrative procedures and slashing red tape to provide an efficient and transparent civil service so that no one needs to recourse to corrupt civil servants to get things done;
(c) Reviewing public officers’ salaries regularly to ensure that they are paid adequately and comparable to that of the private sector;
(d) Reminding government contractors at the time when contracts are signed that bribing public officers administering the contract may render their contracts liable to be terminated. A clause to this effect forms part of the standard contract conditions.
In many of the measures discussed above aimed at combating corruption, the underlying philosophy is one of eliminating the opportunity for corruption by changing incentives, by closing off loopholes and eliminating misconceived rules that encourage corrupt behaviour.
But an approach that focuses solely on changing the rules and the incentives, accompanied by appropriately harsh punishment for violation of the rules, is likely to be far more effective if it is also supported by efforts to buttress the moral and ethical foundation of human behaviour.
All these measures are very effective in dealing with corruption. They can only work if and only if there is political will do eradicate corruption. In Zimbabwe, my take is that there is political will to deal with corruption but there is no political will to actually act against corruption. As we start this year, we hope that Government will use some of these measures to deal with this vice.
Iwe neni tine basa!
Mina Lawe Silomsebenzi!
Dr Mugano is an Economic Advisor, Author and Expert in Trade and Competitiveness. He is a Research Associate of Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University. Feedback: +263 772 541 209 or [email protected]
