How corruption becomes a necessary vice for successful politicians
who win elections by denouncing it
Here is a thought experiment. Imagine you are a presidential
candidate for the 2016 elections in Uganda. You have all the good policies and
ideas. And you want to build a winning electoral coalition. What is the most
critical thing you need? It is building an organisational structure that allows
you to reach all parts of the country.
Now, in most poor countries, modern institutions like
political parties, farmers’ cooperatives, labour unions and other civic associations
to link candidates and their programs to targeted voters are either weak or
absent. This is especially so in those parts of the country where most voters
are – rural areas. The solution in our context is to identify powerful pillars
of opinion (influencers) in the different ethnic and religious communities as
the building blocks of your organisational infrastructure. These include
influential prelates, powerful traditional leaders and other pillars of opinion
such as respected elders, successful businessmen, articulate youths, teachers
etc.
I admit that because of rapid growth of the economy over the
last 28 years, the explosion in education and the spread of access to mass and
social media, Uganda has a large community of citizens whose primary identity
is not religious or ethnic. These are the urbanised second and third generation
middleclass citizens on social media. Many of these can be efficiently reached
and mobilised through their hobbies like sports and entertainment, or through
their professions (lawyers, doctors, engineers, teachers), or occupations
(small and medium scale traders in the informal sectors – boda bodas, barbers,
vendors, kiosk owners, bartenders), etc. However, the vast majority of voters
are still located in the religious and ethnic sphere.
What attracts these influencers to one’s candidature? It may
be because he is charismatic (like Kizza Besigye) and has courage to denounce
the ills of the incumbent. They may feel alienated by the incumbent government
and/or because the new candidate’s message of change appeals to their
aspirations and ideals. But the most powerful incentive in a poor country for
such powerful elites is the prospect of electoral success and the material
rewards this promises.
President Yoweri Museveni’s success is based on many things
– his claim to being a freedom fighter that restored peace and economic growth,
his ability to use the state machinery to bully his opponents and rig the vote.
However, his greatest card is his ability to retain the loyalty of a large
number of these influential figures of opinion in our different ethnic and
religious communities through state patronage. He has crowded his opponents out
of the market for these influencers by the sheer size of cabinet, presidential
advisors, RDCs, security agencies and the State House budget for donations.
But let us assume you defeat Museveni and become president.
How do you reward these influencers and retain their loyalty, especially given
the sacrifices they made in braving state intimidation and harassment to help
you secure victory? Well, by appointing them to powerful and/or lucrative
government jobs as ministers, managers of big government agencies and
businesses etc. One reason for this is for them to deliver on your programs.
The other is for them to retain the loyalty of their followers and expand your
political base. They achieve the latter by using public office to dispense
patronage.
To retain their following, they help their campaign agents
and other lower elites get jobs in government (this undermines merit-based
recruitment) and lucrative public contracts (which undermines transparent and
competitive bidding) etc. And they are always accosted by their followers with
demands for helping meet children’s fees, medical bills and contributing to
funeral expenses etc. They cannot do this on their official salaries. They need
to steal, hence corruption.
Therefore if you actively oppose their corruption, you will
actually be cutting the hand that feeds your political machine. If you arrest
them en masse, they will join the opposition parties to defeat you at the next
election. You cannot keep them in jail because they are entitled to bail. And
you will not secure convictions against them because they will bribe police
investigators, prosecutors and judges. If you interfere with the courts, you
will be accused of undermining due process and judicial independence and
international human rights groups will join them in condemning you.
With the sole exception of Paul Kagame in Rwanda, successful
politicians in Africa have been forced to climb down from the skies of utopia
to the hard rock of reality. Rather than see corruption as an evil to be
fought, they realise it is a virtue (or a necessary evil) for maintaining
political support. I will discuss why Rwanda under Kagame is different another
day. Point is that the incentive structure of our politics undermines reform of
the status quo. How?
The beneficiaries of corruption are the most powerful and
articulate segments of the society, and often they have a large following
because of the patronage they dispense to their followers. They appear in local
and international media and interface with international human rights groups.
The victims of corruption are ordinary citizens who have little or no voice in
public affairs. And they are likely to support a thieving politician because he
shares their ethnicity or religion and has given them some handouts from his
public loot.
You can alienate these influencers and decide to base your
government’s legitimacy on serving ordinary people. This will need to reform
the state and build capacity for effective and efficient delivery of public
goods and services. But how long will this take? Most studies show between
15-25 years at best. But your re-election is only five years away. And the
budget of $150 dollars per person per year in Uganda is too small to enable
government to provide the basket of public goods and services to all its
citizens effectively.
The best solution seems to be a one term presidency. That
will allow you to do so much good even if you do not get re-elected. However,
if the thieves gang up against you and win, you will watch in tears as all your
reforms are reversed. What you left of a clean government becomes a den for
thieves. So what was the value of your five years of effort? You think perhaps
it is better for you to retain some thieves in order to win re-election and
protect the gains of your government.
But this, even with all the good intentions, places you on a slippery
slope. That is the dilemma reform-minded politicians face.
amwenda@independent.co.ug
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