When bribe is the best lubricant of government machinery
Thursday, 28 August 2008
Maswood Alam Khan from Maryland, USA
IF someone as an official can process five files in a day but has ten files in front of him the person who has an emergency to get his file processed will pay him some incentives to get his file cleared first; it is a simple bribery. But it is a clear extortion when the official stops processing even five files without the incentive. Such extortion like bribery is an established reality in Bangladesh as is in many other countries like India, Pakistan, China, and Indonesia where bribe is deemed the best lubricant of government machinery.
The Oxford English Dictionary defines corruption as a willingness 'to act dishonestly in return for money or personal gain'. There is a difference between bribing an official to do something legal (e.g. bribing a civil servant to speed up the process of acquiring a document of some sort) and bribing an official to do something illegal (e.g. bribing a teacher to give a student a good mark in an exam when in fact the student didn't pass).
There are various reasons why corruption takes place and takes hold. Sometimes it is due to the fact that officials are simply not paid very much and so they need to supplement their salaries with money from bribes. Sometimes the bureaucratic system is set up in such a way that officials simply refuse to carry out their duties unless they are encouraged by being offered bribes.
As long as the government makes it mandatory for its citizenry to stand in long queues to get services from only monopolistic public institutions there will never be an end to bribery or extortion. Unless all the government offices are completely privatised the menace of bribery will persist; of course, in that case the number of private offices must be proportionately commensurate with the volume of jobs and clients. Example: mobile phone service providers in Bangladesh. I have at least never heard of any subscriber offering bribes to an agent of any of the private mobile phone operators.
The other way to combat the menace is legalization of bribery itself---though such proposition sounds a bit weird. There are instances in the West where governments had to legalise some crimes in order to monitor who is doing what and to ferret out underground operators of the crimes.
Drugs have been legalised in many European countries after the governments had found it impossible to check and control international drug cartels. By legalising purchase of drugs from stores in the open market the government could earn some revenues, take a respite from their expensive hunts for drug peddlers, and invest time and energy, thus saved, on how to influence the drug world with a view to reversing the deadly courses of drug addicts.
In a similar vein, our government may legalize bribery in offices where officials are loath to process files without incentives. The office of land registration, more known as Sub Registrar's Office in Bangladesh, may be taken as a pilot project where legalization of bribery may be experimented.
If you as a newcomer visit a Sub Registrar's Office in Bangladesh to get your purchased land registered and ask a 'pen pusher' in the front desk what he did mean by 'office expenses' written in pencil on the demand note he would look blank and say he had no idea what you were talking about. He would consider you a mad cap!
Nobody questions why he has to pay extra money in addition to official fees for registration and stamps because for more than 100 years people of Bangladesh have been greasing the palms of those officials who deem such extra earnings their legitimate income.
During my recent visit to a Sub Registrar's office near Dhaka one middleman who volunteered to help me register my newly purchased land claimed he was very close to the chief boss of the office because he supplies the necessary stationery and logistic supports to the office for free. A clerk of the office said grudgingly: "The government does not supply even the indelible ink to soak stamp pads needed for thumb impression on registration documents. We had to procure indelible ink illegally from the local Election Commission Office who had stock of such ink meant for voters' thumbs."
Most of the furniture and office tools in a Sub Registrar's Office are privately bought and employments are also offered unofficially to get volumes of monotonous works like copying, stamping, bookkeeping etc. done by part-time workers who are not in the office payroll. The result is: prompt and on-time delivery of services with no cost to be borne by the government.
Government officials in Indonesia are low paid employees and amazingly they don't shout slogans to raise their pay and perks. The government of Indonesia incredibly keeps their eyes shut to what people are doing with public funds as long as the government finds that the public projects are completed in time in line with the best international standards. Therefore, in spite of gaining notoriety for bribery Indonesia is not as visible to Transparency International as Bangladesh is.
The basic difference between Indonesia and Bangladesh in respect of corruption by public servants is that Indonesia does not compromise with the quality of goods and services and their timely delivery even if the cost goes a little high; while Bangladesh cares least about the quality and delivery schedules but cares most about the lowest prices and the highest bribes.
Indonesian government allows every stakeholder a 10 per cent allowance (bribe) to keep in his/her pocket on condition that the quality of the products or services is not compromised under any circumstances, no matter if the price is hiked by a few percentages. The stakeholders try their best to help the government recover the loss so incurred for allowing bribery by expediting the implementation work and ensuring the best quality of the products and the services. The result: a visitor to Indonesia finds the airport equipped with the best amenities and their railway no way inferior to that in the West.
On the other hand, in Bangladesh the work is awarded to a company who offers the lowest (never the best) possible price for delivering a product or a service and each and every stake holder, all the functionaries of the work giving authority from the top to the bottom and the contractor equitably defined, chisels his share of ten per cent or more out of the project. The result: everybody -- a beggar in the street, a customs official at the airport, a receptionist in a hotel -- cries to beg dollars from a tourist and the tourist does not find water pouring from the bibcock in a public toilet.
Legalising bribery is cowardice on the part of a government. The best way however to fight bribery is to segregate the front office from the back office so that the individual service providers never come in contact with the recipients of the services. A glaring example of such segregation that has been proven amazingly successful in Bangladesh has been set in our passport office.
In the list of grand successes made possible under the present caretaker government one success story that has become a part of family folklore is how the passport office, which was once a den infested with middlemen collecting bribes, has all on a sudden taken on a forlorn look with employees now passing their workdays with no extra income, thanks to a bold decision to entrust the outlets of Trust Bank (a bank under the ownership of armed forces) as front office of the Passport Department to collect all kinds of fees in connection with issuing new passports and renewing the old ones leaving the main passport office as the back office to process the work, just like a factory.
Another strategy to cope with the menace of bribery could be the replication of how the private operators of mobile phone companies are catering to the services of phone subscribers.
A revolutionary change can also be brought in Bangladesh if services now being provided in the government offices of land management -- the root of 80 per cent litigation in our courts of law -- could be computerized through digital mapping with the aid of Global Positioning System (GPS) the way Bangladesh Army made possible the issuance of national identification cards with digitalised photographs and finger prints.
Bribe, kickback and commission are buzzwords heard day in and day out. The situation has reached a point where, for all major contracts with the government, the percentage is an accepted norm known by both the giver and the recipient. Businessmen and contractors dealing with the government do not complain, because what they pay to bribe government officials is charged right back to the government. But a man on the street cries because to get even small things done he has to pay from his own pocket without any scope to recover the amount of bribe from anybody else.
Not only is bribery commonplace in our country it now has a job description. There are standard bribe costs in every transaction like in getting caught while jumping a red light, for immediate railway seat, for a driver's license in a hurry, to pay to peon to see his boss, for a clerk to move a file, to purchase a cinema ticket, to have your phone repaired etc.
Those who are corrupt -- especially those indulging in petty corruption--- are often heard saying, "See, even the prime minister and other ministers get briefcases full of money. I am, after all, a poor person. The inflation rate is so high; I have my family to look after. I have marriageable sons and daughters. What does it matter if I also accept some money?"
The writer is General Manager, Bangladesh Krishi Bank.
He may be reached at e-mail:
maswood@hotmail.com. He is now in the USA for holidaying in North America with his relations
and friends
IF someone as an official can process five files in a day but has ten files in front of him the person who has an emergency to get his file processed will pay him some incentives to get his file cleared first; it is a simple bribery. But it is a clear extortion when the official stops processing even five files without the incentive. Such extortion like bribery is an established reality in Bangladesh as is in many other countries like India, Pakistan, China, and Indonesia where bribe is deemed the best lubricant of government machinery.
The Oxford English Dictionary defines corruption as a willingness 'to act dishonestly in return for money or personal gain'. There is a difference between bribing an official to do something legal (e.g. bribing a civil servant to speed up the process of acquiring a document of some sort) and bribing an official to do something illegal (e.g. bribing a teacher to give a student a good mark in an exam when in fact the student didn't pass).
There are various reasons why corruption takes place and takes hold. Sometimes it is due to the fact that officials are simply not paid very much and so they need to supplement their salaries with money from bribes. Sometimes the bureaucratic system is set up in such a way that officials simply refuse to carry out their duties unless they are encouraged by being offered bribes.
As long as the government makes it mandatory for its citizenry to stand in long queues to get services from only monopolistic public institutions there will never be an end to bribery or extortion. Unless all the government offices are completely privatised the menace of bribery will persist; of course, in that case the number of private offices must be proportionately commensurate with the volume of jobs and clients. Example: mobile phone service providers in Bangladesh. I have at least never heard of any subscriber offering bribes to an agent of any of the private mobile phone operators.
The other way to combat the menace is legalization of bribery itself---though such proposition sounds a bit weird. There are instances in the West where governments had to legalise some crimes in order to monitor who is doing what and to ferret out underground operators of the crimes.
Drugs have been legalised in many European countries after the governments had found it impossible to check and control international drug cartels. By legalising purchase of drugs from stores in the open market the government could earn some revenues, take a respite from their expensive hunts for drug peddlers, and invest time and energy, thus saved, on how to influence the drug world with a view to reversing the deadly courses of drug addicts.
In a similar vein, our government may legalize bribery in offices where officials are loath to process files without incentives. The office of land registration, more known as Sub Registrar's Office in Bangladesh, may be taken as a pilot project where legalization of bribery may be experimented.
If you as a newcomer visit a Sub Registrar's Office in Bangladesh to get your purchased land registered and ask a 'pen pusher' in the front desk what he did mean by 'office expenses' written in pencil on the demand note he would look blank and say he had no idea what you were talking about. He would consider you a mad cap!
Nobody questions why he has to pay extra money in addition to official fees for registration and stamps because for more than 100 years people of Bangladesh have been greasing the palms of those officials who deem such extra earnings their legitimate income.
During my recent visit to a Sub Registrar's office near Dhaka one middleman who volunteered to help me register my newly purchased land claimed he was very close to the chief boss of the office because he supplies the necessary stationery and logistic supports to the office for free. A clerk of the office said grudgingly: "The government does not supply even the indelible ink to soak stamp pads needed for thumb impression on registration documents. We had to procure indelible ink illegally from the local Election Commission Office who had stock of such ink meant for voters' thumbs."
Most of the furniture and office tools in a Sub Registrar's Office are privately bought and employments are also offered unofficially to get volumes of monotonous works like copying, stamping, bookkeeping etc. done by part-time workers who are not in the office payroll. The result is: prompt and on-time delivery of services with no cost to be borne by the government.
Government officials in Indonesia are low paid employees and amazingly they don't shout slogans to raise their pay and perks. The government of Indonesia incredibly keeps their eyes shut to what people are doing with public funds as long as the government finds that the public projects are completed in time in line with the best international standards. Therefore, in spite of gaining notoriety for bribery Indonesia is not as visible to Transparency International as Bangladesh is.
The basic difference between Indonesia and Bangladesh in respect of corruption by public servants is that Indonesia does not compromise with the quality of goods and services and their timely delivery even if the cost goes a little high; while Bangladesh cares least about the quality and delivery schedules but cares most about the lowest prices and the highest bribes.
Indonesian government allows every stakeholder a 10 per cent allowance (bribe) to keep in his/her pocket on condition that the quality of the products or services is not compromised under any circumstances, no matter if the price is hiked by a few percentages. The stakeholders try their best to help the government recover the loss so incurred for allowing bribery by expediting the implementation work and ensuring the best quality of the products and the services. The result: a visitor to Indonesia finds the airport equipped with the best amenities and their railway no way inferior to that in the West.
On the other hand, in Bangladesh the work is awarded to a company who offers the lowest (never the best) possible price for delivering a product or a service and each and every stake holder, all the functionaries of the work giving authority from the top to the bottom and the contractor equitably defined, chisels his share of ten per cent or more out of the project. The result: everybody -- a beggar in the street, a customs official at the airport, a receptionist in a hotel -- cries to beg dollars from a tourist and the tourist does not find water pouring from the bibcock in a public toilet.
Legalising bribery is cowardice on the part of a government. The best way however to fight bribery is to segregate the front office from the back office so that the individual service providers never come in contact with the recipients of the services. A glaring example of such segregation that has been proven amazingly successful in Bangladesh has been set in our passport office.
In the list of grand successes made possible under the present caretaker government one success story that has become a part of family folklore is how the passport office, which was once a den infested with middlemen collecting bribes, has all on a sudden taken on a forlorn look with employees now passing their workdays with no extra income, thanks to a bold decision to entrust the outlets of Trust Bank (a bank under the ownership of armed forces) as front office of the Passport Department to collect all kinds of fees in connection with issuing new passports and renewing the old ones leaving the main passport office as the back office to process the work, just like a factory.
Another strategy to cope with the menace of bribery could be the replication of how the private operators of mobile phone companies are catering to the services of phone subscribers.
A revolutionary change can also be brought in Bangladesh if services now being provided in the government offices of land management -- the root of 80 per cent litigation in our courts of law -- could be computerized through digital mapping with the aid of Global Positioning System (GPS) the way Bangladesh Army made possible the issuance of national identification cards with digitalised photographs and finger prints.
Bribe, kickback and commission are buzzwords heard day in and day out. The situation has reached a point where, for all major contracts with the government, the percentage is an accepted norm known by both the giver and the recipient. Businessmen and contractors dealing with the government do not complain, because what they pay to bribe government officials is charged right back to the government. But a man on the street cries because to get even small things done he has to pay from his own pocket without any scope to recover the amount of bribe from anybody else.
Not only is bribery commonplace in our country it now has a job description. There are standard bribe costs in every transaction like in getting caught while jumping a red light, for immediate railway seat, for a driver's license in a hurry, to pay to peon to see his boss, for a clerk to move a file, to purchase a cinema ticket, to have your phone repaired etc.
Those who are corrupt -- especially those indulging in petty corruption--- are often heard saying, "See, even the prime minister and other ministers get briefcases full of money. I am, after all, a poor person. The inflation rate is so high; I have my family to look after. I have marriageable sons and daughters. What does it matter if I also accept some money?"
The writer is General Manager, Bangladesh Krishi Bank.
He may be reached at e-mail:
maswood@hotmail.com. He is now in the USA for holidaying in North America with his relations
and friends