Many people believe the existence of multiple institutions
for accountability in public procurement provide checks and balances on the
process. This belief is born of the efficacy of such checks and balances in
Western democracies rather than an objective study of how they work in a poor
and polarised society like Uganda. Many Ugandans think Western systems of
accountability can be introduced here and they perform as they do in rich
nations. This copy and paste approach makes a bad situation worse.
It is good to learn and borrow from the good practices of
others; so Africa does not need to re-invent the wheel. But it is also
important to appreciate the unique social configurations that shape our
policies and therefore adjust foreign systems to our circumstances or introduce
completely different institutional innovations to address our problems. Uganda
has myriad institutions to check abuses in public procurement: PPDA, IGG,
Attorney Generals Chambers, contract committees in every ministry and public
body, parliamentary oversight committees. Yet rather than check corruption,
they tend to accentuate it.
Many studies show that corruption per se does not impede economic
growth and development; rather, it is the specific form it takes that shapes
its developmental impact. I feel bad to admit this truth because corruption is
a morally repugnant thing. But be that as it may, in 1995, ex-president Roh Tae
Woo of South Korea was arrested for corruption. He admitted to
accumulating a personal fortune of US$ 650m while in office. This was just a
tip of an iceberg. It turned out that there had been a lot of corruption in
South Korea during its period of industrial transformation.
So why didnt corruption impede transformation in South Korea
and Indonesia but destroyed the economy of Marshal Mobutus Zaire? New York
University professor, William Easterly in his book The Elusive Quest for Growth
argues that corruption is corrosive when it is decentralised (i.e. when there
are many bribe takers and their imposition of bribes is not coordinated among
them). However, corruption is less negative when it is centralised (i.e. a
government leader organises all corruption activity in the economy and
determines the share of each official in the ill-gotten proceeds).
Easterly uses the common pool problem: multiple roadblocks
by soldiers in Mobutus Zaire. Each soldier at the roadblock is an individual
predator, without taking into account the effect of his actions on other
soldier-predators. The wealth of the travellers is a common resource that all
of the independent thieves try to appropriate. Easterly argues that the bribes
demanded will be higher as each soldier-thief tries to get as much revenue from
the hapless traveller as possible before other soldier-thieves get it. Under
such circumstances, the total theft rate will be higher.
This is the problem with corruption in public procurement in
Uganda. The myriad bodies to check corruption in public procurement in Uganda
are the equivalent of soldiers at roadblocks in Zaire; we have many bribe
takers whose theft is not coordinated among them. Thus, an investor awarded a
contract by the ministrys contract committee runs the risk of losing it on a
petition to PPDA if his rival supplies a better bribe there. Equally, the one
who has been approved by PPDA could lose it if their rival petitions the IGG.
This creates a lot of uncertainty over rights to property granted by government
hence negative incentives for investment. This is one reason why increasingly,
only Kamikaze investors look up our country for investment.
Therefore, the only way an investor can be secure with the
allocation of a given right is by trying to bring on board all bodies with
power over his/her tender: Attorney Generals Chambers, IGG, PPDA, the ministry
contracts committee, State House, parliament, etc. The transaction costs (the
time and effort taken in coordinating all these bodies to arrive at a common
agreement) of security on a common agreement among all these institutions are
very high. And since each of these centres of power demand a cut from the deal,
the financial costs inflict a heavy toll on the hapless investor. That is why
tendering deals that meet all procedural rules in Uganda are very expensive.
Now, let us remove these decentralised layers of control and
introduce a highly centralised form of corruption (Gen. Suhartos Indonesia).
Easterly argues that in a corrupt Mafioso, one leader seeks to maximise the
take from the corruption network as a whole. This leader has a vested interest
in his victims prosperity because he knows that stealing too much will cause
his victim to take evasive action, a factor that will lower the total bribe
collections. So the bribe tax-rate will be lower at all the collection centres
in order to maximise the total take of the system. Such corruption is less
damaging to growth. The lesson is that for corruption to have less damage, you
need a structure of incentives that makes corrupt leaders solicitous of their
victims prosperity. Removing multi centres of control in poor countries seems
the solution.
With the decentralised corruption we see in Uganda, many
public officials are corrupt but the state is incompetent to apprehend them.
The likelihood that someone will be punished for corrupt behaviour is
positively related to the strength of state enforcement and negatively related
to the number of corrupt officials. This means that even if the state prosecutes
some corrupt officials, the likelihood of being caught is very low; there are
too many corrupt officials from whom to choose when the state decides to
prosecute. So, the thieves steal with impunity.
There can be a legitimate argument that these multiple
institutions of control over public procurement merely reflect the actual
fragmentation of power within Ugandas polity. In other words, they are
consequences, not causes of decentralised power, and with it decentralised
corruption. This means that even if we removed them at an official level,
effective power over procurement would remain decentralised. Informal factions
within the state and inside State House itself would vie for tenders in similar
fashion. But this should only make us think of the right institutional
innovation to achieve better, albeit incremental change in public procurement.
amwenda@independent.co.ug
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