Corruption, Collusion, Nepotism

Since the relatively benevolent dictator fell in 1998, the people in the second of my worlds have coined another new acronysm – CCN – which stands for Corruption, Collusion, and Nepotism. It has almost become a national mantra whenever the topic of reforming government comes up. Politicians, government workers, people on the street and farmers on the back side of nowhere all mouth this new acronysm. It has even entered many of the hundreds of local languages around the archipelago.

In this part of the world, nations vie with each other to see who can be in the top 3 most corrupt nations. The second of my worlds (and inded the third of my worlds also) is usually in the top three. The problem isn’t so much the governments but rather that corruption, collusion, and nepotism are part of the very fiber of society. Everybody does it from the least to the greatest. It is done without thinking, a reflex action. You expect to help your relatives get jobs. And your employer doesn’t mind hiring your relatives. You expect perks from your job, after all it doesn’t pay much anyway, how else can you live? You expect to gouge other people, after all you have been gouged in everything you have ever tried to do too. When you buy something for a group you belong to, you naturally ask the shop owner for a receipt for more than what you actually paid. It is expected, accepted, and budgeted. It is part of life. So even though people are currently fond of accusing others of CCN, most are totally oblivious to the fact that they too are guilty.

Case in point, some friends were recently visited by a bureaucrat from the department of education who sponsors their visa. The bureacrat flew in from the capital city to visit them. They put her up for three days, wined and dined her, and took her sight seeing. She talked a lot about how they are cleaning up corruption and that part of her visit was to check on them and make sure they really did what they said they did. But before she left, she went to one of the nicer hotels in town and got them to write her a receipt for three days' worth of room and food in that hotel so that she could get reimbursed - even though her entire stay was paid for by my friends.

But there are signs that there has indeed been progress. Recently the Ministry of Finance has been in the headlines. A new finance minister has been cracking down on CCN in her department.

[B]y raising pay for bureaucrats, and not demonizing those who previously took payoffs to make ends meet, she has raised standards and steeled a reputation as an incorruptible reformer. Her message to her staff is simple and positive: "I only have one goal: I want the people [of this country] to trust us, this department, because this country will go nowhere if the people don't start to trust their own government.

Another encouraging sign was when the State Minister for Administrative Reforms admitted in December that half of the country’s four million civil servants were unqualified. Indeed. The bloated, lackadaisical civil service segment is notorious for inefficiency, corruption and cronysm. Astoundingly, the minister further stated that “We’re not a charitable institution. We can no longer afford to pay people who don’t work properly.” He said that they are planning to eventually reassign the 2 million unqualified workers to other jobs in an effort to stop, as he put it, “bureaucratic inefficiencies that leaked money.” A pilot project involving the Finance Ministry found that more than half of the workers in the Finance Ministry were unqualified. Even more astonishing, the unqualified will not be fired, but rather retrained as agricultural consultants and will then be posted in villages throughout the country.

This leaves me breathless with amazement as I try to imagine tens of thousands of low level financial bureaucrats born and raised in the capital city being retrained as agricultural consultants and uprooted along with their families and sent to rural areas in the far flung reaches of the archipelago! Could it really happen???!

Nevertheless, the fact that the issue is being addressed is immensely encouraging.

Yet another encouraging sign was regarding a recent conflict between a mining company and local residents. Usually these sorts of complaints go on and on with blame being thrown around until the little people give up and move on with their lives. Astonishingly, the governor stood up and said the fault belonged to his department who hadn’t investigated the issue properly when the mining concession was made. Not only that but he will take responsibility! Wow!