It will take more than a video show to end corruption

While we were looking elsewhere, the revolution began. It was live and has been captured on videotapes! Perhaps the revelation of corruption in the judiciary should not come as a shock; rumours of such wrongdoing have persisted through the years.

Every such allegation is met with the riposte “Where is the evidence?” Anas Aremeyaw Anas, the redoubtable investigative journalist, apparently took the question literally and set about looking for the “evidence”. It is here now and coming soon to a screen near you.

For the purposes of the proverbial person from Planet Mars who has just landed on these shores, here is a summary of the situation so far. Anas and his company Tiger Eye mounted a two-year undercover operation which has netted 34 judges and magistrates in addition to scores of officials of the Judicial Service.

As at the time of writing this piece, a number of judges were seeking a court order to stop the sting operation from being shown on television while others are challenging the Chief Justice for setting up enquiries into the allegations of bribery captured by Tiger Eye undercover cameras.

Indications from the Ghana “talk-osphere” show that most Ghanaians are happy with Anas for his exposure of corruption in high places. It is impossible to exaggerate the hopes that some Ghanaians have pinned on the Anas tapes to kill corruption off completely in Ghana. In a show of near biblical faith, people are speaking of the scandal as the rebirth of the nation.

The irony of such a scandal giving birth to such high hopes underlines the frustration that many people feel about the endemic corruption in our country. As a commentator put it piquantly in an Akan translation, corruption has bathed Ghana with every drop of its water. We are swimming in its muck.

People know that we are paying a very high price for corruption. Almost all official transactions in Ghana are tainted by corruption; even merely checking on the most mundane and routine information at a government department is a costly privilege.

Some departments such as those that handle land registration, building permits and the like are said to be as profitable to the officials as owning oil blocks at Cape Three Point. Corruption adds huge margins to the cost of doing business and, therefore, to the cost of living in Ghana.

In fact, corruption within the judiciary is only a small bit of a major enterprise but an important one. Most anti-corruption experts and campaigners say that stopping corruption among the police and judiciary officials is the key to stopping corruption officially in Ghana.

This makes sense because the police and the judiciary are the institutions charged with dealing with crime. How do they carry out this important task if they are criminals themselves?

However, the idea that we can wipe out corruption with one video show is fanciful. No matter how powerful the video show, its impact cannot last beyond the next scandal unless it gathers a critical mass of public opinion and political mobilisation to help it on its way.

The fight against corruption goes back a long way and of course corruption itself has an even longer pedigree. Some would say that it started with the birth of humanity.

There is no doubt that some momentous events in our history have proved to be less “historic” than they appeared at the time. Kwame Nkrumah’s dramatic Dawn Broadcast of 1961 was said at the time to change the course of our history by ending corruption and the activities of a “self-seeking” state and party officials.

It created a buzz around the country and was said to signal Nkrumah’s shift of ideological gears. But its overall effect on corruption was nil.

The commissions of enquiry that were set up after the 1966 Coup revealed a lot that had gone wrong not only with the state and the ruling party but with society at large. One of the slogans that emerged after those revelations was: NEVER AGAIN. Things, however, got worse.

Corruption was always cited as the main cause of every coup and each coup was meant to stop corruption. It became a ritual after every coup to launch a costly commission of enquiry. None of these commissions was accountable and their reports merely gathered dust in obscure cupboards in some government department. Nothing changed.

Perhaps the most audacious anti-corruption measures were the executions of three former military rulers and other senior officers during the “house-cleaning” exercise of the June 4 Coup in 1979.

Warehouses were emptied because their owners were said to be corrupt; long jail sentences were meted out to officials found guilty by courts hastily convened to try people for corruption and abuse of power. Things only got worse.

It is not as if corruption is some kind of invisible force that cannot be seen.

We see it every day and feel its effects especially in the worsening of living conditions of ordinary people, but nothing much changes. One has to wonder how much one video show naming and shaming a number of compromised judges can achieve in terms of the bigger picture.

Let there be no doubt about the courage and commitment that has been expended in this enterprise; it is a good thing done with the purest motives but we need to be careful about its impact on the fight against corruption.

We need to understand that the fight against corruption is not an event but a process and we all have to play our part in order to achieve its objectives. If we fail to tackle corruption, this country will never move in the direction most of its people desire and deserve. We need to understand corruption in order to fight it effectively.

There is deep irony here. Most of us are against corruption yet culturally, the acceptance of corruption in our society is overwhelming. Today, no one questions one’s source of wealth. We take wealth as the measure of success and automatically put the stamp of social approval on anyone who acquires wealth no matter how. Corruption has become so endemic that it is difficult to tell what is corrupt and what is not any more.

Another problem we have is the restricted definition of corruption in the minds of most Ghanaians; it means mostly bribery. That leaves a whole slew of wrongdoings and abuse of power that goes on under our noses every day. Indeed, corruption is one of the manifestations of lawlessness that today plagues our land unchallenged.

We can defeat corruption but only on ONE condition and the condition is government’s commitment. Only the state has the power and the resources to overcome the dark forces of corruption. Therefore, the reason corruption has persisted through the ages and indeed prospered is because our governments have not been as committed to its destruction as they profess.

Think about it. How come Anas and his team can do what thousands of police detective and other state security agents have never done?

The only conclusion is that historically the state has not been as interested in fighting corruption as it pretends to be. Obviously the people in charge of the state machinery are the main perpetrators and beneficiaries of corruption.

This is not to say that ordinary people cannot fight corruption. Indeed, the government will only act if the people demand it more loudly and effectively.

We must put corruption on the political agenda for the next election. Fighting corruption is the key that will unlock this country’s potential that has never been in doubt; but eluded us for so long.

It will take more than a video show to end corruption but what a show this will be if it mobilises all of us to the barricades. This could be the needed catalyst for the anti-corruption revolution to begin.