Amusing game of petty corruption in Africa as the rule of law, systems fail

Petty corruption has turned into a culture and it is evident in the private and public sectors.

Ordinary people are used to being asked for “something small” before they get public services.

Officers in both private and public institutions also expect “something small” for a service. It is now a custom – or so one may argue.

People have become so accustomed to this habit that some do not bother to think about how it is affecting the general development of the society.

It has just become a normal everyday thing, for some.

SERVICES
The root cause of petty corruption is well documented. Inefficiencies in supply of services is one thing.

Where services are in poor state and poorly supplied, it is natural that people will compete for them.

This competition is usually unhealthy for some and not so for others.

Those with ability to pay for private services do not compete for such services.

But these few sometimes decide to outcompete the poor; instead of paying – because they can – they decide to bribe for those services. They beat the poor out of the queue.

REINFORCEMENT
The poor are also not the same. There are those among them who can "pay something small" for these services.

This is what makes bribery common in delivery of services. People pay bribes but no one is punished.

The more people pay, and the more people are not punished for taking bribes, the more bribery becomes a culture.

People then give it another name because it is a normal thing.

The second cause – though not common – is how the law is applied to deal with small problems.

The best examples of small problems are traffic offences. For instance, if one is ‘caught’ for speeding on a highway, there are several options.

TRAFFIC OFFENCES

One is to face the traffic police officers who operate as an Automated Teller Machine (ATM) on the highway. The second is to plead guilty and agree to go to the courts.

Many recount problems with the last option of pleading guilty. The police will keep you on the road for a long time.

They may decide to take you to a police station simply to waste more of your time because you failed to part with a bribe.

They may also say they do not have facilities for you to pay the bail.

If you are charged in court, the court station may be far away from your place of work. It is another inconvenience.

In the court you begin another round of problems. The magistrate may not use common sense in applying the law.

COURT

If you plead guilty you may be fined some little money as the law permits.

If you decide to challenge the prosecution all the way to the end, you may get the maximum fine for the offence.

Any traffic offender experiencing this drama and inconveniences will certainly think about solving the problem at the traffic police ATM on the road than walk the route to the court.

Travelling across Africa one notices that petty corruption is a new norm and appears in many and laughable forms.

Public officials devise hilarious ways of getting bribes without being caught.

CAIRO POLICE

Let us begin with Egypt. Cairo is an amazing place in many ways. Traffic officers take bribes while watching carefully not to be caught.

This is what I learnt after a visit to the city a while back.

One Sunday afternoon while on the way to the airport to catch a flight home, a colleague sharing a taxi with me requested the taxi driver to stop by a shop where he could buy some items.

The taxi driver, with a smattering of English, agreed to stop somewhere in the city.

My colleague got out and went straight to the shop. Unknown to the taxi driver, a traffic officer was watching.

He came straight and told the driver that he was overlapping. He cited many other breaches of traffic rules that police often cite.

The driver exchanged some pleasantries with the policeman. Though not familiar with the language of these pleasantries it was certain that a deal had been cut.

THREAT OF ARREST
The policeman stepped back and the driver got out of the car.

He left the car and went to a restaurant a few metres up the road. My colleague came back and met me in the car.

We waited for the driver without knowing what was happening. When he came back, he narrated the story to us.

It was just laughable. The policeman had threatened to take him and his passengers to the police station.

At the station he would be charged with several traffic offenses. The driver argued that we were in hurry and pleaded guilty.

He apologised. The policeman accepted the apology but asked that the driver to “escort” the apology with some lunch. This of course meant a bribe.

FOOD
The policeman came up with an idea on how to get the bribe without being caught.

He asked the taxi driver to go to the restaurant up the street and take some tea.

After taking the tea, he should pay for it plus the “tea” for the policeman.

He was instructed to tell the cashier at the restaurant that a “policeman by this name will come and please give him tea for this amount of money”.

This way no one would know that taxi driver had bribed the policeman. It is only both of them who knew where to take tea and how much was paid for it.s

SALARY
Kinshasa city in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) has even more amusing stories of bribes and how the police relate to the ordinary people for survival.

Some years back, the police were not paid regularly.

And if they would get a pay, it was not enough even for a week’s living costs.

Generally the police lived – and do live - from hand to mouth. All that one had to do was to be innovative.

This innovation was witnessed in the use of police uniforms in the city.

Because no one was bothered about identity card for the police, a uniform became the main source of income for a police family.

Innovative families would use the uniform 24/7. A young man would use it at night; the sister would pick it in the morning while their father may need to use it in the afternoon.

KINSHASA OFFICERS
With uniform as a source of income, some would extort from visitors or traders or motorists.

When the real officers catch up with this, what they do was simple: you would give them their share of the loot and they would get off your route.

Other public officers in Kinshasa have even more amusing approaches to bribes.

At the airport, the customs officials use very strange methods to get bribes. Those who import goods from places like China and Dubai are many.

They are expected to pay taxes at the airport.

One day, a business lady landed at the airport and paid some little tax at the desk for what she had imported. No receipt as is usual.

NIGERIA
Another officer was watching and rushed towards her a minute later. He also demanded that she pays something small.

She pleaded that she had already paid someone else but this officer demanded his share. The lady did not have any more money to pay.

The officer insisted on getting ‘something small’.

The lady gave him one of the trousers, which he checked against his waist and excitedly said Oui! Oui! (Yes! Yes! in French). He let her go.

Nigeria arouses interests on matters corruption because it is broadcast as the headquarter of corruption.

Whether it can win this prize today is a subject of another day given what is happening in South Sudan.

PICKPOCKET

All to say is it has hilarious examples of this behaviour. A friend gave a $100 (Sh10,000) bill and asked for $20 notes at a bureau de change.

They did not have the notes and decided they would give him $50 bill notes, which he agreed to.

No sooner than he had got the notes than a friend told him that he had the $20 notes and therefore he should return the two $50 notes.

Trying to do so was difficult. The lady insisted that one of the notes was ‘fake’.

But he shouted back that she had given him the notes. She stood her ground.

Watching from the sides, I told my colleagues to give up the argument.

We laughed it off after we recalled that some months earlier, in Dakar, Senegal, I had lost money to the same pickpocket – pretending to shine my shoes – twice the same day, morning and early afternoon.

RULE OF LAW
These examples show systems are not working. People pay bribes for services to be delivered.

They show the law is poorly enforced. The absence of the rule of law undermines the culture of doing things right.

The examples also show that values are changing. Lack of integrity in public and private life is a common feature.

The DRC example shows institutional and leadership failure, which is typical of many other places.

These are big development issues all over Africa. Fixing systems for service delivery; fixing leadership; building a culture of integrity; and enforcing the rule of law are the solutions to the continents problems.

Prof Karuti Kanyinga is based at the Institute for Development Studies (IDS), University of Nairobi; [email protected]