145 - Saving Lives by Eliminating the Payoffs of Corruption: A Russian Perfidy
Corruption kills, corruption leads to conflict, corruption discriminates, corruption impoverishes, corruption cripples economic and social outcomes, and corruption almost always is criminalized. Anecdotally, we can easily observe how in Putin’s Russia and even in Trump’s America the grasping hands of greed distort national priorities and undermine the pursuit of beneficial lives for citizens. (Prosecutors in New York City sought to try Trump for racketeering, based on his many questionable financial shenanigans before becoming president.)
President Volodymyr Zelensky is attempting in Ukraine to roll back the wayward corrupt dealings that so plagued previous Ukrainian governments dating back to Soviet days and since, systematically in the Putin-influenced period from about 2003 to 2014, and lingeringly until now. The Delhi State Government has valiantly sought to expose and roll back the growing spread of corrupt practices that permeates the pro-Hindu excesses of India’s BJP administration under Prime Minister Narendra Modi, former chief minister of Gujerat, where influence peddling was widespread. Zambian President Hakainde Hichilema, elected in 2021 after a long struggle, promises to transform his copper-rich country into a non-corrupt oasis, after decades of official pilfering.
These efforts, and many more, are welcome since so much of the world suffers from rampant corruption. But it is a massively uphill battle to combat human and political instincts to plunder; rulers and ruling regimes gleefully enrich themselves. Greed is deeply wired into our DNA, private interests too often being privileged over respect for the public interest.
Much of the globe is infected by corruption. It saps as much as 3 percent of annual per capita GDP across large swathes of Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and the Americas. The World Bank reports that $1 trillion or more is lost each year, globally, because of corrupt thieving.
The corruption complaint is central to citizen concerns in about two-thirds of the world’s countries. Charges and countercharges surge across social media with politicians and their opponents accusing each other of behavior harmful to the public interest. Elections are influenced corruptly. Wars, like the invasion of Ukraine, are fomented and pursued for corrupt reasons. Indeed, in addition to Putin’s attack, civil conflicts in places like Burkina Faso, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Madagascar, Mali, Mozambique, Myanmar, Papua New Guinea, the Solomon Islands, Somalia, South Sudan, Sudan, Thailand, and Zimbabwe are all fueled by determined avarice, mostly abuses of the public purse.
Conquering corruption is therefore not only desirable, but a critical imperative if an overriding goal is to help underprivileged peoples to prosper and to begin to experience substantially improved livelihood outcomes. Combating corruption is thus among the more important initiatives that world order and contemporary civilization can take materially to strengthen today’s planet and its inhabitants.
Fortunately, a well-respected analysis of the extent and locus of corruption throughout 180 of the world’s nations helps to focus our attempts to provide better for citizens everywhere.
The annual and well-respected Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI), released last week by Transparency International in Berlin, enables critics of corruption to examine each nation’s degree of illicit dealing and sleaze against its peers and others. The CPI’s method of scoring countries according to their corruption is not perfect, but after almost thirty years, the CPI is well regarded. Rather than basing critiques and sanctions on anecdotal evidence, the CPI’s findings combine observations and perceptions by national citizens with those of outside observers.
Overall, this year’s index ratings show that the spread of corruption is still rife in much of the world and that the differences between places that are less corrupt and those that are consumed by corruption is wide. There are only a small number of countries that have subdued avarice in public life.
Not surprisingly, the top ten least corrupt countries in the world according to the Index include the usual Nordic suspects: Denmark (90), Finland and New Zealand (87), Norway (84), Singapore and Sweden (83), Switzerland (82), Netherlands (80), Germany (79), and Ireland and Luxembourg (77). (Scores out of 100 in parentheses.)
The polities listed as the world’s most corrupt, and thus the most troubled and the most deprived of governance and services, are also not unexpected. But this year Somalia has overtaken South Sudan at the bottom of the CPI. In addition to almost everyone involved in and about government being on the take, Somalia is plagued by insurgent terror, drought, famine, bad governance, and persistent insecurity. South Sudan, a country only since 2011, has never managed to give its warring peoples a sense of security, calm an ethnic divide, make sufficient food available, or begin to develop rather than plunder.
The ratings of the most corrupt countries according to the CPI, and starting with the 171st listed nations, are: Burundi, Equatorial Guinea, Haiti, North Korea, Libya (17); Yemen (16), Venezuela (14), South Sudan and Syria (13), Somalia (12). Note the scores, again out of 100.
More interesting in many ways are the mostly European countries that are just below the top ranked nations: Estonia, Iceland, Belgium, the United Kingdom, France, and Austria (in that order). Canada, Australia, and Japan also fall into this second tier of less corrupt countries. But not the United States which, thanks to the Trump excesses, ranks 24th, after the Seychelles (the least corrupt polity in the African Union) and just before Bhutan and Taiwan.
Georgia and Italy are tied for the 41st place on the CPI, with scores of 56. Poland is 45th (55), Bulgaria 72nd (43), Belarus, Colombia, and Moldova, are 91st (39), Ukraine and Zambia 116th (33), and Mali, Paraguay, and Russia are tied for 137th place (28). (Washington is unusually worried today about Paraguay, a country of nasty graft in high places.) Places like Pakistan, Liberia, Bangladesh, Afghanistan, Nigeria, and the ten bottom rankers are all even less well rated than Russia.
This is a dispiriting list (except for the upmost echelon), showing how much more the world needs to do to improve the lives of its suffering peoples. That conclusion is especially apt for Russia, where Putin’s oligarchically inspired corruption literally kills hundreds of thousands of innocent Ukrainians and Russians. His narcissistically driven war is perhaps the globe’s most deadly example of corruption destroying whole cultures, the livelihoods of farmers and industrial workers, and the peaceful pursuit of basic freedoms.