One in four persons paid a bribe at public institutions

A survey of 114,000 persons in 107 countries indicated that one in four persons paid a bribe in the last 12 months when accessing public services and public institutions. These results did not reflect any improvement over the years since the barometer was first launched in 2003.

Transparency International, a global organization devoted to fighting and eradicating corruption, released its 2013 Global Corruption Barometer (GCB).

According to the Institute, the encouraging news is that nine out of ten persons surveyed indicated that they are prepared to act against corruption while two out of every three persons who were asked to pay a bribe refused to do so. However, governments, civil society and the private sector need to do more to assist in the eradication of .  In particular, many respondents believe that governments are not doing a good job in fighting corruption and that institutions that are relied upon to fight corruption cannot be trusted. Topping the list are the Police and the Judiciary.

In 51 countries, political parties are seen as the most corrupt institutions while 55 per cent of respondents indicated that governments are run by special interests. Transparency International’s release suggested that politicians can lead by example by publishing asset declarations for themselves and their immediate families while political parties and individual candidates need to disclose the amounts and sources of funding for their activities so as to, among others, avoid potential conflicts of interest.

The key recommendations of Transparency International are:

•             Governments need to be more transparent by opening up their books and activities to public scrutiny and by ensuring that accountability mechanisms and channels are in place to get the public engaged in oversight;

•             Promulgating legislation to provide citizens with freedom of access to information on government programmes and activities;

•             Ensuring codes of conduct are in place for all public officials;

•             Ensuring standards of public procurement and public financial management are consistent with, among others, the United Nations Convention Against Corruption;

•             Prioritising anti-corruption reforms in the Police and ensuring the independence of the Judiciary;

•             Providing checks and balances to ensure that private interests and power groups do not dictate governments’ policies and actions;

•             Citizens should be encouraged to refuse to pay a bribe whenever asked and should use existing reporting mechanisms to speak out about corruption that they witness or experience;

•             Ending impunity by effectively preventing, detecting, investigating, prosecuting and punishing acts of corruption;

•             Citizens should use their voice, vote and spending to punish the corrupt, such as only voting for clean candidates and parties that stand in elections, and only buying from companies that have strong integrity systems and clean business practices;

•             Passing and implementing laws on making political party financing transparent, including requirements for political parties, political candidates and their donors to publicly disclose donations;

•             Passing and implementing whistleblower laws to enable citizens to report wrongdoing in the public and private sectors without fear of retribution; and

•             Enabling independent civil society organisations to function as effective watchdogs of government and to help citizens to hold public officials to account.

It will be surprising to many that Guyana is among a few countries that were not included in the survey as many of the above suggestions made by TI resonate powerfully with local conditions and have been advocated repeatedly by a wide cross section of civil society organizations, opposition activists, and private individuals. Unfortunately not every country could be included in the sample due to funding restrictions.

The corrupt will likely take comfort in the knowledge that they are facilitators of a growth industry. However, every dollar we spend to grease someone’s palm is a dollar diverted for the enrichment of an undeserving few and our own impoverishment not to mention the reinforcement of a bad habit. Let us as Guyanese citizens join the nine out of ten in the rest of the world and not wait until we have a situation as in Zimbabwe, where women giving birth have been charged US$5 every time they scream as a penalty for “raising a false alarm”.

This press release provides two tables from the full report which can be seen on the Transparency International website at http://www.transparency.org/gcb2013