The cancer of corruption

Corruption of public officials

Transparency International regularly publishes the rankings of corruption in almost every country in the world. Except for Switzerland and the Nordic countries, where it is very low, no country is spared this scourge, which is acquiring catastrophic profiles in Africa, Asia, Latin America and in a few European countries. Neither the USA nor Germany is spared. The richer and more educated the country is, the more subtle and sophisticated the corruption is, even if it is minor: instead of stealing money, for example, by means of percentages on the awarding of state purchases, ‘soft’ corruption can consist of the play of influences to obtain academic positions or in the autartic companies of the state, in the traffic of privileged information, in covert favoritism, etc.

At the bottom of Transparency International’s 176 country blacklist are Afghanistan, North Korea and Somalia. Switzerland is high in the sixth rank, Germany in the thirteenth, the USA in the nineteenth and France in the 22nd. Then there is Italy in the 42nd range, Spain and Portugal in the ‘middle field’, above the countries of Eastern Europe. Far behind are Colombia and Greece. Forms of corruption go as far as criminal conspiracy in some states, for example in drug trafficking and the purchase of judges. One form of corruption is not wanting to see it, which is perhaps what happens in the European Union, in relation to the distribution of the subsidies that are given to the States most in need of help. Could it be true what some people think, that entrusting large funds to the State for their distribution, is the way in which the EU get influence on the consent of the rulers?

What most outrages the citizen is that instead of cutting down on corruption, the state is bent on continually imposing new taxes in order to replace, in the first place, what takes away everyone’s money, and only then does the tax revenue go into benefits for the citizens. And this with an average tax burden in the OECD of 48%.  The state is thus degenerating into a formally democratic bureaucracy which is increasingly turning away from the desire to serve the citizens and becoming an end in itself.  When, moreover, this degeneration is based on an ideology – such as that of Nazism, Communism, Populism, etc. – the State becomes a monster that ends up killing many people, pursuing absurd and subjugating aims of freedom and human rights.

To understand corruption, we must admit that there is a tendency towards evil in all men. By virtue of his high perfection as a rational and free being, the path of virtue and good, or that of vice and evil, opens up before him. Some animals kill in order to eat, but only enough to satisfy their hunger. No animal is capable of gathering reserves in this sense, because the vice of covetousness is possible only in man. Otherwise there would not be that wonderful balance in nature, because everything would sink, until in the end, neither the lion nor the shark could survive because there would be no reproduction and new life. But man is so often not satisfied with what he has.

So, I ask the readers: where does this ‘chip’ or inclination to evil in man come from, which usually has more force than the inclination to good, if the individual has not received a formation of his conscience. Why has no science been able to explain this rationally? This problem is not without its mysterious features. Almost all religions have all kinds of practices and rites of purification of evil in man. It seems that the Judeo-Christian revelation is the one that has most correctly identified and explained the origin of this inclination to evil, as a consequence of original sin.

The corruption of the citizen

At this point, should we not ask ourselves whether we too, in Europe, are not brainwashed in a materialistic way, because we pursue above all pleasure and the exaltation of our own ego?  We must bear in mind that we are immersed in a world that presents, represents and exalts the ego, sex, pleasure, health and physical strength in a way that has hardly ever been seen before, which encourages immorality. The mass media disseminate and enhance this exaltation of false values, until in the end, the man who lives only for his family and children becomes for many an alien. Luckily, there are still many ‘rare’ people of this type, who are the ones who sustain the good progress of everything and, above all, ensure the birth of balanced people, who in the long run are the ones who will impose themselves and lead a society in which the permanent social cases (drug addicts, alcoholics, profound laziness, psychopaths and bitterness

I remember in this connection what happened in a supermarket in Zurich, where the wife of a friend of mine was shopping with a lot of children.  An old lady gave her a derogatory look, telling her that this was socially irresponsible. The mother stood in front of her and said aloud, as if to be heard by all: ‘Madam, when you are very old, my children will feed you. To this everyone looked at the other side as if they had heard nothing.

The waste of the bureaucratic apparatus

But let’s get back to our topic. Excessive bureaucracy encourages corruption. In this respect, one example among many is Spain, where public functions are organized at national, regional and communal level. And alongside its enormous cost, there is the problem of waste.  All the scientific authorities in the field agree that any business done by the state is always more expensive than if it were done by the private sector. This is leading, especially in the USA and England, to the privatization of functions that by their very nature do not have to be carried out directly by the state, such as prisons, schools, railways, airlines, energy and gas, health care, pension funds, waste collection etc.  When granting these sectors to private companies, the State only has to demand minimum conditions and guarantees.

It is said that every people have the government it deserves. Certainly, this sounds cruel and unjust, but deep down it has some truth, because at the end of the day public officials behave ethically like all other citizens, with the difference that they are at times easy and tempted to get rich unjustly.

Forms of corruption

The forms of corruption are very varied. I remember that in the sixties, during my law career in Asunción, Paraguay, I worked as the personal secretary of a high German official, who had the mission of awarding businessmen a German state aid to small and medium industry. Once I was approached by someone who was interested in obtaining important financing. He had the prejudice that he had to bribe me with all kinds of offers like trips in his plane, parties and money etc. When I refused, he came up to me and said almost in my ear: ‘But Mr. Kopa, don’t we all have our price? What is yours?

The crudest forms of corruption, as there are still in not a few less advanced countries, is to put one’s hand in the government’s till to hand it out to a few, who then take it out of the country. This form corresponds to the mentality of a chieftain, who considers himself the absolute owner of the life and property of his subjects.  For example, in Nigeria, from 1960 to 1999, US$ 400 billion disappeared from the Nigerian state. And research by the University of Massachusetts has found that between 1970 and 1996, capital flight in sub-Saharan countries – the poorest in the world – was 187 billion USD. In both cases it was money from the sale of oil or other natural resources.

For decades, the media blamed the rich countries for the poverty of countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America due to their economic colonialism. But the main cause of that poverty has always been the corruption of the government itself, leaving the people themselves in misery, not wanting to create stable legal conditions to attract foreign investment.  I remember how in Paraguay, where I lived from my three to my twenty-five years of age, there was never any money from the state to ensure a minimum development of the country due to the great corruption of the rulers. But lately this has changed for the better.

In recent years we have seen, in horror, how the inability of governments in the Middle East and Africa is leading hundreds of thousands to migrate in miserable boats to lands and countries where they hope for a better future. And the gangsters who organize the crossing charge each of them thousands of dollars, with the aggravating circumstance that so many times they make the boat unable to reach its destination, which is a sowing of corpses at sea and a crime that cries out to heaven.

Corruption is both, corrupting oneself and corrupting other. The unwritten law that ‘regulates’ these maneuvers is today’s you, tomorrow’s me. In my professional life I have known cases in which honest, incorruptible people, who instead of being esteemed for not wanting to cooperate in evil, were removed from public office.  In this situation, not infrequently the honest man becomes the undesirable one, the fool among the political gangsters, who, not having so many times support in the citizenship, is a great human and political value that is expelled from public functions.

How does the corrupt ruler get paid?  In the Czech Republic, in recent years the police have caught several people red-handed. But the ‘prudent’ thing is to receive the money in a bank account outside the country, or, in smaller cases, corruption can consist of paying for an expensive vacation, or buying a house well below its market price, etc. Fortunately, the government in the Czech Republic is fighting the scourge of corruption. People on the street can get a humorous point out of this by saying that the kilometer of the Czech motorway costs twice as much as in Germany and lasts half as long.

Finally, it has to be said that the businessman who passively suffers from corruption, accepting to pay its price, would probably not commit a reprehensible act if he could not otherwise keep his company and the work of his employees afloat.  Moreover, when it is known that a significant number of competitors are also willing to pay, or have even taken the initiative to buy a decision from the public official beforehand, things become even more complicated.  Here we can only make a judgement on the specific case.