Corruption in umno is like fungus in private part.
During his five years in power, corruption in the government’s inner organs was one of the major ills that Prime Minister Datuk Seri Abdullah Ahmad Badawi was supposed to combat. This he failed to do.
One cannot but correlate the electoral bribery widely practised at the divisional level with the corruption found among people higher up in government.
The symbiosis between grassroots, leaders, government and civil servants is too strong to be ignored.
Worried voices are now being raised by Umno’s leaders, such as former Premier Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad, that the party is doomed if money politics — the flagrant buying of votes — is not curbed.
This brings us to the problem of how corruption should be perceived.
Is corruption like the common cold, one of those things the country must live with? It won’t kill you but you cannot escape it. Sometimes, more people are affected, sometimes less. It is all seasonal.
Or is it an immune deficiency sickness, like AIDS? Once you are infected, you cannot rely on your own body to stave the disease. You need external medication.
Quite clearly, the government sees corruption as a common cold-type of ailment. Keeping it in check is all it wishes to do. It is not seen as a terminal illness and there is fear that too powerful a prescription might destroy the body politic.
In other words, political will at the top has been lacking, at least over the last 30 years. Indeed, corruption naturally compromises the political culture.
That is most evident when the dominant party’s internal channels to power are contaminated. The relationship between the top and the bottom becomes dialectical. The dynamics move in both directions.
Once the microbe has spread, moral standards fall, hypocrisy grows rampant and defence mechanisms become institutional. The immune system is neutralised. Abdullah’s dismal record in fighting corruption is a symptom of that.
The diagnosis on corruption — given by Umno’s best doctors, no less — is changing, no doubt. But will it change so much that corruption will come to be seen as an AIDS-like ailment instead?
There are good reasons to doubt that. Those who can do something about it are easily compromised, either personally or through relatives, friends and supporters. The spirit gets sapped of its strength. Tweaking and threatening critics become the tactics of choice and not the implementation of systematic reforms.
But from where did the systemic microbe originate and what fed its impressive growth rate?
A lot of the blame, strangely enough, should be put on the economic success that the country has enjoyed.
If leaders concentrate only on growth figures, a successful economy is bound to nurture a culture of corruption. Sudden wealth corrupts, and in order to stop that effect, checks and balances through the rule of law, bureaucratic transparency and legal accountability have to be put in place.
In an expanding economy, politicians and businessmen grow to need each other and the dubious practices they develop quickly become the ethos of the nation. Bribery of various sorts becomes an expected step in the process of getting things done.
In this context, some points made in a famous 1979 lecture on business immorality in less developed countries by the economic architect of Singapore, Dr Goh Keng Swee, are highly relevant.
“Modernisation” is the carrier of the microbe, reasoned Goh. The attainment of political freedom by former colonies did not bring automatic progress and prosperity. Their new governments had to formulate plans for development and carry them out. This process requires the construction of discretionary administrative controls. Here, the problem begins.
These controls have “a nasty habit of proliferation”. Businessmen in developing countries, always “operating under a regime of endemic shortages”, quickly find themselves dependent on licences and permits. Their profits depend on getting these, and so these licences and permits come to command a high premium. A market price for them comes into being.
The power to grant such licences and permits becomes the goal of the individual official or politician. While corruption in low places is about the sharing of spoils among the many involved, corruption in high places tends to push decision-making upwards, towards the top few. “For the really big prizes, it is the big boss who decides.”
When global businessmen are thrown into the equation, the magnitude of corruption takes on impressive proportions.
In a society infected by this process, “cynicism, apathy and finally acceptance of corruption as normal conduct in public administration” begins to spread. One ends up with the diseased body politic that Goh calls a “kleptocracy”.
- By Ooi Kee Beng, The Malaysian Insider
