Petty Bribery

Freedom House in this post highlights a few Africa-related points from Transparency International's recently released 2009 Global Corruption Barometer. Countries such as Sierra Leone, Uganda, Kenya, Ghana and Zambia made the list of the states most afflicted by petty bribery, a problem that most survey respondents ascribed to civil-service officials.

During my time in Ghana last summer I didn't encounter much petty bribery--which might have to do with me being a foreigner, as will be explained below--and the people I talked with overall seemed to think that it wasn't a huge problem. That doesn't mean it didn't exist. On the Delta flight back to the US, I sat next to a Ghanaian woman who had gone through a several-hour-long ordeal at the airport as the customs official claimed she had overstayed her visa, and quietly demanded a "dash" (bribe, both verb and noun) to let her through. Tourist visas are almost always stamped for 60 days upon entry into Ghana, and I stayed for exactly 60 days--I was prepared to whip out my calendar and count out the days for the officer if I ran into trouble, but I went through alright. This woman, who had also stayed for exactly 60 days, almost didn't make it through; however, she stood her ground, with her staunch belief that Ghana was a shining African country, and refused to pay the dash, even threatening to talk to the supervisor. She got through. And nevermind the fact that there's an unspoken one-week grace period for visa overstays.

Catching corruption at the small levels like with these customs officers will be difficult to do, especially with governments being fiscally constrained right now and civil-service pay taking a hit. Which civil-service officer wouldn't ask for a dash if his or her fellow officers were doing the same? Freedom House points out the efforts of Sierra Leone's president, Ernest Koroma, at combatting high-level corruption, something that has won him a good bit of popularity, (an initiative that might become easier given access to new technologies), but Sierra Leone still suffers from petty bribery at the lowest levels.

Kasapa logo. Image sourced from here.

Fighting petty corruption from the top-down is probably impossible: individual government officials won't have the incentive to change "business-as-usual" if they can't gather the collective energy and tackling entrenched norms with more and more education programs seems Sisyphean. In Ghana, I was amused by a system implemented by Kasapa, a medium-sized mobile-phone carrier, one that portrays itself as being the coolest and hippest option (it also created the first digital network in Ghana). Kasapa allows customers to transfer minutes and, I believe, money from their accounts to other customers' (i.e. family, friends, etc.) accounts using their phones' texting features, a process that they call "dashing". "Dash" in this context appears all over Kasapa's bright green billboards in Accra and Kumasi. Perhaps by creating this alternative definition of "dash", Kasapa, a private company, can help trivialize petty bribery and make citizens realize how absurd it is? Kasapa, my anti-dash. It's a start.

I've just found an article from the Ghana News Agency on Ghana's results in the Global Corruption Barometer. The news agency reports that Ghanaians' trust in the government to fight corruption has fallen from 67 per cent in 2007 to 58 per cent in 2009. One reason could be that Ghanaians now have higher standards and expect their governments to do more. However, many Ghanaians were unsatisfied with the NPP's administration for not doing enough in the rural areas; in particular, many Ghanaians I talked to were upset at the NPP building a new Presidential Palace in Accra, a palace ironically now occupied by the NDC's John Atta Mills. Furthermore, Ghana expects to start reaping revenues from offshore oil in the next couple years, and it is possible that citizens are worried about the corruption that that might bring about.