Putting corruption in perspective

The changes

The new political demands altered the governance structures of those societies making old forms of governance obsolete, and the practices that had been normal and legal were made corrupt. The works of Max Weber and Karl Polanyi illuminate this point.

Therefore, low levels of corruption are a consequence not a cause of development. History suggests corruption accompanies transformation, acting like flies on a cattle carcass. This point is best made by Samuel Huntington argued in Political Order in Changing Societies. He argues that corruption tends to be low in poor traditional societies. It then grows during a nation’s intense period of modernisation and subsides when the country graduates to wealth.

Prof Chris Blattman wrote one of the most nuanced and thoughtful articles in The Independent in 2012. He posited that if you think X (in our case corruption) is an issue you should give top priority, you need to believe two things: a, it matters a lot for development and b, there is something you can do about it. Blattman, relying on many cross-country studies of corruption over the years concluded that the alleged harmful effects of corruption are minor, and there may be little we can do to change it.

I would take Blattman’s argument further and make an even more controversial proposition that even if it were true corruption is harmful to economic development, perhaps it survives because it serves other roles. For instance, by bringing elites from different ethnic groups together around “loot” of public resources, corruption may be politically integrative in a poor country. This means eliminating it, even though morally appealing, could be politically destabilising.

In this case, it is possible the political returns from corruption (national integration) may exceed its economic costs (slow growth) – and this may be the reason many poor countries remain mired in it.

Now I am aware this is a highly controversial proposition so I have a few caveats. First, we need to remember Leo Tolstoy’s observation that all happy families are alike but every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

All rich countries may be alike, but each poor country has its own social configurations. What works for Kenya may not work for Rwanda. For example, I think the unique social-political configuration of Rwanda today makes corruption highly destabilising, the more reason the government there fights it. But I suspect corruption may be the glue holding ethnically diverse nations such as Nigeria, DRC, and Kenya together. Here is why.

The major feature of the postcolonial state in Africa is that nearly all these countries were crafted via colonial conquest from a hotchpotch of ethnic groups ignorant of each other or hostile to and jealous of one another. For most of the colonial period, they were governed as “tribes” each under its own “customary law.” At independence, this hotchpotch of tribes over a given geographical area all of a sudden became a country. But the people lacked a common national consciousness and elites lacked a common agreement on basic national goals.
How Africa’s leaders sought to mold a new national consciousness gives an insight into the value of corruption and patronage.

All governments need legitimacy. The founding fathers of African nations rode on the wave of national independence, relying on their role in the struggles against the colonial state for legitimacy. This could not last long because they had made promises that independence would deliver an array of public goods and services to everyone. The problem was that the state they inherited lacked the institutional capacity to serve that role.

But more critically, it lacked sufficient revenues to finance the promises they had made. So after independence, they had to design new strategies of political survival and state consolidation. Nearly all of them came to rely repression to maintain order and patronage to secure elite consent. This was because these two were affordable and cost effective compared to service delivery.

This year, the US government (federal budget plus state and city budgets minus federal grants) will spend $27,800 per person. This makes it possible for the US to rely on service delivery for legitimacy that is, it can afford it. In the 2015/16 Budget, Uganda government plans to spend $150 (about Shs536,000) per person. There is corruption and wastage in Uganda. But in the wider sense, our country is too poor to provide an array of public goods and services elites expect.
Poor countries cannot depend on service delivery for legitimacy because they cannot financially afford it. There are poor countries that have succeeded in building state legitimacy on service delivery – Cuba, post genocide Rwanda and the state of Kerala in India – but these are rare exceptions.

Secondly, we forget that the concept of governmental legitimacy based on the delivery of public goods and services in the West is a recent development, beginning in the late 19th century and consolidating after World War 11. This process was gradual in the West, coming of age after the state had developed enormous institutional capabilities on the one hand and high government revenues on the other. For most of Western history, the legitimacy of the state and its government was largely based on the divine right of kings to rule, the charisma of individual rulers and the ability to make war.