THE EAST AFRICAN-NAIROBI-KENYA
Opinion
The More You Fight
Graft, the Bigger it Gets
The other Sunday, priests were telling their flock to pray to the good Lord to rid us of corruption.
We have called in God because we can now see that what we hoped was a short-lived episode of thieving, bribery, extortion and nepotism that could be ended by arresting or shaming the culprits is no such thing.
So entrenched is corruption in the national life that the public no longer gets worked up over it nor do editors cover it much.
This is not because they don�t care. Rather, it seems, it has become such a big problem that the ordinary man and woman feel the solution is beyond them.
Corruption has become something like polio many years ago, when individuals couldn�t deal with it alone and it needed huge national health budgets and World Health Organisation programmes to eradicate.
Thus we see a whole industry growing up around corruption. One would have thought that it was something easy to define whose causes could be easily understood.
But no, as campaigns to reduce corruption fail, there is a growing sense that more needs to be known about it, and "new insights" are needed in order to fashion anti-corruption strategies that work.
The growth of the anti-corruption machinery in Uganda in the past 10 years is nothing short of amazing.
At one point, there was only the Inspector General of Government (IGG) going after crooks who had stolen public funds. Now there is a Minister of Ethics and Integrity. There is, of course, a chapter of Transparency International.
Once it was only the Public Accounts Committee of parliament that dealt with issues of corruption raised in the Auditor General�s report. Now there about 10 full committees and sessional committees that spend most of their time discouraging abuses and other shenanigans in various government sectors.
Last week was dedicated to anti-corruption activities. There were various festivities related to the anti-corruption campaign: conferences, walks, publications.
There were supplements speaking about the evils of corruption, and statements from the government�s anti-corruption czar, the IGG about the moral state of the nation, and ministers who have not complied with the Leadership Code by failing to declare their wealth (that is, the majority of them.)
Not too long ago, theatre and dance from various communities in Uganda marked the anti-corruption week. Women with browned hair brought in from upcountry charmed the city folk with their animal skins, beads, and energetic dances at the National Theatre.
In the past two weeks, nearly every anti-corruption organisation has talked of "doing research," and those that had already done it have published their findings.
The newsletter of the Uganda Debt Network, which tracks whether tax money and donor funds are put to prudent use, sometimes reads like an evidence sheet in a highway robbery case.
The response of the crooks to the growing body of people who want to put an end to their activities has been to get smarter. In turn, the clean-up brigade has had to bring in professional anti-corruption workers, and to come up with more sophisticated campaigns.
The result, however, is that � unlike soccer, where during the high season of the game, the World Cup, everyone from the local drunk to the smug sports commentators on TV is deeply involved and their predictions and opinions carry almost equal weight � as corruption reaches its peak, it�s in danger of becoming an elite activity with Oxford University types leading the fight against it.
Polio was gradually defeated as we came to know more about it and spent money on it. Corruption, on the other hand, is turning out to be a reverse-effect disease. The tragedy of our times is that the more knowledge we gain about it and the more money we spend fighting it, the more we seem to lose the fight.
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Charles Onyango-Obbo is Managing Editor of The Monitor newspaper of Uganda.
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