Corruption is Africa’s worst domestic snare

Jun 14, 2005

PERSPECTIVE OF A UGANDAN IN CANADA<br><br><b>Opiyo Oloya</b><br><br>Leaders of the G8 nations-Canada, Japan, France, Germany, United States, Italy, Russia and the United Kingdom will in four weeks gather at Gleneagles, Scotland to bask in the glow of cancelling outright $40b in debts owed by 18 of t

PERSPECTIVE OF A UGANDAN IN CANADA

Opiyo Oloya

Leaders of the G8 nations-Canada, Japan, France, Germany, United States, Italy, Russia and the United Kingdom will in four weeks gather at Gleneagles, Scotland to bask in the glow of cancelling outright $40b in debts owed by 18 of the poorest nations in the world. The nations include Benin, Bolivia, Burkina Faso, Ethiopia, Ghana, Guyana, Honduras, Madagascar, Mali, Mauritania, Mozambique, Nicaragua, Niger, Rwanda, Senegal, Tanzania, Uganda and Zambia.

The self-congratulation will acknowledge that these countries will no longer be required to pay about $1.8 b annually to service debts owed to various international lenders. There will be a lot of ink poured on how this money will go toward improving education and health care in the chosen developing countries.

Indeed, properly utilised, this money could go a long way in building new classrooms, hiring teachers, reducing class sizes, and purchasing medicine for threadbare hospitals especially in the rural areas. In essence, this could be just the spark that some of the struggling nations need in order to shift the dynamics of development so that the poor can benefit.

However, many domestic and international obstacles will conspire to prevent the poor person from ever realising the benefits from the cancellation of the debt. Despite the lip service paid by many leaders of developing nations vowing its eradication, corruption is the biggest domestic issue in Africa and in Latin America.

In fact, as seen last week in South Africa where Vice President Jacob Zuma has been firmly linked to kick-backs and fraud in a South African court, the problem is not whether there are corrupt leaders, but whether there is a will to fight them. South African skeptics believe that President Thabo Mbeki does not have the intestinal fortitude to fire his vice-president.

Instead, he will do what the majority of African leaders do when high-level corruption is exposed — they appoint a commission of inquiry, and then promptly shelve the report by the commission! In the meantime, people will have forgotten about the corruption and moved on. Woven into the very fabric of daily life in many of the countries named in the debt relief, this social ill eats away at every attempt at progress.

Take Bolivia for example. According to the Corruption Perception Index of Transparency International, the South America country of 12 million people has grown increasingly more corrupt in the last decade. In 1996, it ranked 36, in 1998 it dropped to 69, in 2001 it was number 85, and last year it tied for 114th place with the likes of Kazakhstan, Zimbabwe, Sierra Leone and Uzbekistan.

Meanwhile, Mali, Madagascar, Senegal and Uganda fare equally badly in the TI Corruption Index by ranking 77th, 82nd, 85th, and 102nd respectively. In Uganda, despite a tough judiciary that curries no favour with anyone, the leadership is still seen as selective with who gets charged with corruption and who gets pardoned.

A recent example of soft-pedalling is the shelving of the hard-hitting High Command Report on corruption implicating former and current army officers. Instead of publicly releasing the report and initiating prosecution against those named in the report, the government has so far chosen to clamp up, leaving the authors of the report at risk of retaliation from the senior officers fingered in the report.

Although the Ghana Integrity Initiative (GII) has made some progress over the last two years in the fight against corruption, the problem is still deeply rooted. Early this year, Dr. Charles Wereko-Brobby, former CEO of the Volta River Authority responsible for the generation and transmission of electricity in Ghana was forced to resign because of endemic corruption within the organisation.

On the world stage, there are equally many issues that will rain on the parade celebrating the cancellation of the debts by G8 nations. There is the problem of huge farm subsidies that allow developed nations, especially the United States, to dump cheap goods on the world market, in essence destroying whatever little opportunity the poor farmers in developing nations have to scratch a living from the soil. Many consumers in developing nations tend to buy the cheaper imported food products from developed nations than those produced by indigenous farmers.

Meanwhile, high tariffs and taxes virtually ensure that goods from developing nations rot where they are produced rather than marketed on the world market. Many African and South American countries, for example, are blessed with pristine organic land that produces high quality organic food with excellent market values in developed countries.

However, despite the huge demand for organic foodstuff, there is a concerted effort by developed countries to make sure that food items from developing countries do not replace those produced on big farms in North America and Europe. In the end, to make the cancellation of the debts really a remarkable era in the history of human progress and in the eradication of poverty, developed nations have an obligation to go further in opening up their markets.

Most important, those poor highly indebted nations should also start cutting down the trees of corruption, however big and well entrenched they may be. It is all about survival really, the survival of the little poor people.

Opiyo.oloya@sympatico.ca

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