Food for thought.

  
Robert Klitgaard, the renowned author of “Controlling Corruption,” memorably reduced the definition of corruption to a simple mathematical formula: C=M+D-A. This stands for: Corruption equals Monopoly plus Discretion minus Accountability. This stylised formula is not without its problems, but it is an equation we need to pay attention to if we are really interested in ‘killing corruption before it kills us’. Klitgaard’s is a systemic view of corruption which points us at what to do to eliminate or at least reduce corruption. According to this renowned economist, corruption thrives where the power to make major decisions is concentrated in a few hands, exercised with discretion and not subject to control. Long before Klitgaard propounded his formula, Lord Acton had said the same thing in a more poetic way: power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely.
Let’s be brutally honest with ourselves: it will take a lot for our executives not to abuse the enormous powers that we have concentrated in their hands. The president can, with just the stroke of a pen, decide who gets what, including import waivers and oil blocks. He can create as many slush funds as he likes, and he doesn’t have to be very creative as there are legions of revenue-generating agencies that have become autonomous countries within a country and can be corralled to any use by the man with the knife and the yam. On paper, we have provisions that guarantee the independence of heads of some of these agencies, but in practice we have a political system that doesn’t insulate them from being thrown under the bus.
Our president and the governors are not only allowed hefty security votes, but they are also allowed to define what constitutes threats to our security, and they are allowed to dispense security votes in ways they won’t spend their own hard-earned money. In theory, no money can be spent without appropriation. But we all know that security votes/budgets are rarely discussed in the open by the legislature nor subjected to public scrutiny. We also know that all manner of extra-budgetary expenditures are undertaken from known and unknown slush centres like the central bank and the national oil company. Concentration of powers that can be exercised with discretion and without accountability is unfortunately not restricted to the president and the governors. We may be lucky to get occasional positive outliers, but our system is conditioned to produce nothing other than corruption. Subjecting our system to the test of Klitgaard Equation will help us see what we need to fix to produce a different outcome.