Africa shows how to make poor, poorer

NY Times:

The fight against corruption in Africa’s most pivotal nations is faltering as public agencies investigating wrongdoing by powerful politicians have been undermined or disbanded and officials leading the charge have been dismissed, subjected to death threats and driven into exile.

“We are witnessing an era of major backtracking on the anticorruption drive,” said Daniel Kaufmann, an authority on corruption who works at the Brookings Institution. “And one of the most poignant illustrations is the fate of the few anticorruption commissions that have had courageous leadership. They’re either embattled or dead.”

Experts, prosecutors and watchdog groups say they fear that major setbacks to anticorruption efforts in South Africa, Nigeria and Kenya are weakening the resolve to root out graft, a stubborn scourge that saps money needed to combat poverty and disease in the world’s poorest region. And in Zambia, a change of leadership has stoked fears that the country’s zealous prosecution of corruption is ebbing.

The perils of challenging deeply rooted patterns of corruption have been brought home recently with the suspicious deaths of two anticorruption campaigners. Ernest Manirumva, who worked with a nonprofit group, Olucome, investigating high-level corruption in Burundi, was stabbed to death in the early morning hours of April 9. A bloodstained folder lay empty on his bed. Documents and a computer flash drive were missing, said the president of Olucome, Gabriel Rufyiri.

And in the Congo Republic, Bruno Jacquet Ossebi, a journalist who had announced he was joining a lawsuit brought by Transparency International to reclaim the ill-gotten wealth of his country’s president, died of injuries from a fire that raced through his home in the early hours of Jan. 21.

The broader anxieties about Africa’s resolve to combat corruption have emerged from troubled efforts in several countries.

In oil-rich Nigeria, Africa’s most populous nation, where watchdog groups say efforts to combat corruption are backsliding, Nuhu Ribadu, who built a well-trained staff of investigators at the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, said he fled his homeland into self-imposed exile in England in December. Officials had sent Mr. Ribadu away to a training course a year earlier, soon after his agency charged a wealthy, politically connected former governor with trying to bribe officials on his staff with huge sacks stuffed with $15 million in $100 bills. Mr. Ribadu, who was dismissed from the police force last year, said he had received death threats and was fired upon in September by assailants.

“If you fight corruption, it fights you back,” he said.

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Poor people stay poor by continuing to do the things that made them poor to begin with. Corruption is a form of theft from the nation as a whole. It is deeply anti capitalistic. Under a capitalistic system, the guy with the best product or service at the best price gets the business. In a corrupt culture the guy who gets the business is the one who pays the most to corrupt officials and has no incentive to deliver either good services or goods. While the corrupt official may gain some wealth it is at the cost of the country as a whole, which means the country will be less prosperous and fewer people will have the ability to build wealth.

It is largely a cultural problem. Nigerians who immigrate to the US have been extremely successful in pursuing a good education and building careers based on hard work. They don't have that opportunity in Nigeria because of the corruption. Until African countries are ready to change their culture they will continue to be poor.