Editorial»
Hard graft
NOV 22 - Nepal has slipped to 143rd position on the annual Corruption Perception Index (CPI) complied by the global anti-graft watchdog Transparency International (TI). According to CPI 2009, the country — which stood 121st last year among the 185 in fray — ranks below every South Asian country except Afghanistan. TI-Nepal, releasing the index last Tuesday, attributed Nepal's slide to “its poor legal framework and weak law enforcement mechanism.” Most of the countries ranked alongside or below Nepal in the CPI are either ravaged by wars or wreaked by famines. These countries are characterised by weak anti-corruption legal framework and opaque rules of governance, with politics taking primacy over social concerns.
Also found wanting in corrupt states like Bangladesh and Pakistan, according to TI, is the political will to bring the corrupt to book, as high-level government officials and top politicians themselves are knee-deep in graft. In an example of the blatant misuse of pubic property in Nepal, ministers and top government officials have been found competing against one another for expensive vehicles. Separately, a recent TI-Nepal examination of the books of the major political parties found a great deal of opacity in their financial reporting. The state of lawlessness in the country is also manifest in some Nepali ministers taking the law into their own hands to punish ‘disobedient’ civil servants.
Meanwhile, the Commission for Investigation of Abuse of Authority (CIAA), the chief anti-corruption watchdog in the country, is unable to prosecute corrupt civil servants who, more often than not, get off the hook thanks to their strong political connections. Political protection of the corrupt has thus rendered CIAA toothless. Although CIAA claims to have resolved most of the corruption cases filed with it, successive governments have been reluctant to implement its verdicts. Scantly-staffed and poorly funded, much remains to be done to increase its reach and bolster its capacity.
Nepal's case is a reminder that big political changes do not necessarily produce the corresponding desired changes in governance. As the political wrangling continues, vital tasks like cleaning up bureaucracy and ensuring greater transparency in public accounts have been conveniently sidelined. Sadly, even in the changed political climate, people have to put up with snail-paced service delivery and the scourge of institutionalised graft every step of the way. Whether it is traffic police letting off an errant driver for a small bribe, or bureaucrats asking for their cut in contracting out a big development project, their old ways are unlikely to change so long as hand-greasing is seen as the normal way of getting things done in Nepal. This self-defeating attitude will be hard to change in a matter of days. But a little political will to reinforce the anti-graft legal framework and a little public push for greater accountability may, little by little, deliver the desired results.
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