Reduction of corruption

BANTAY GOBYERNO

Ike Señeres

I am fully supporting the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) of the United Nations (UN), but I could not really understand why the goal set is to have zero poverty worldwide by 2030. In some UN literature, it says that the goal set is to eradicate extreme poverty, which actually gives it a qualifier or a convenient way out.

However, I could not really find literature explaining what extreme poverty is, or how different it is from ordinary poverty. As I see it, it would have been better to just say that the goal is to reduce it down to 10%, at least we could imagine that one in ten people are poor. I understand that my topic here is corruption and not poverty, but surely there are many parallels.

It is said that prostitution is the world’s oldest profession, but perhaps that is not really true. As I see it, the world’s oldest profession is thievery or stealing in other words. At the risk of stirring some controversies, I would say that poverty may be the root cause of both prostitution and crime is poverty, thievery being only a form of crime.

As we know it now, both prostitution and crime are still prevalent in human civilizations, and there seems to be no end to it. With some glimmer of hope, we could say that if and when poverty is eradicated, both prostitution and crime would be eradicated too. With that, corruption could be possibly eradicated too, acts of corruption being crimes as well, one way or the other.

Basing it on the goals of the UN, would it also be possible to eradicate extreme corruption by 2030? Assuming that we agree that acts of corruption are crimes as well, we could perhaps say that we should really eradicate poverty first before we could eradicate corruption, poverty and corruption being in a cause and effect relationship.

In truth however, it is really easier said than done, because corruption is just one head of a two-headed dragon and the more we know what the dragon really is, the more chances that we could kill it. Short of saying that it is really a dragon, we should say instead that its two heads are graft and corruption, two heads that are in a cause and effect relationship.

Up to know, I know of many government officials who could not really tell the difference between poverty reduction and poverty alleviation, perhaps in much the same way that they could also not tell the difference between graft on one hand, and corruption on the other.

To some extent, we could say that with more poverty alleviation, there could be more poverty reduction. The bottom line however is that poverty reduction means actually lowering the poverty rate, while poverty alleviation simply means making the sufferings of poor more bearable. Shifting now to our main topic, I could actually say that with more corruption, there would be more graft.

Nobody really knows whether the egg came first before the chicken, but I am a hundred percent sure that corruption came first before graft, because these two are in a cause and effect relationship. Nobody really cares whether we call it bacon and eggs or vice versa, but if really want it to be in the right order, we should really call it corruption and graft. Strictly speaking, no government official ever commits corruption, but many government officials are grafters.

That is so because the corruptors are the people who offer bribes to government officials who in turn become grafters if and when they would accept the bribes. There is another side to that however, because if the government official is the one who solicits, it is not considered as a bribe. It is only considered as a bribe if it is offered first by the corruptor.

Just as we know that poverty is perhaps the cause of prostitution and crime, we should also know that discretion is the cause of corruption. Down the line, we could then say that corruption is the cause of graft. We should really know this cause and effect relationship, just as we know that evaporation is the cause of rains, and down the line, raining is the cause of flooding.

Just as we know that there will never be rains not unless there is no evaporation, we should also know that there will be no corruption if there is no discretion. Looking at this from the left field, we could even say that there would be no discretion if there is automation, because there is no discretion if there is automation.

So sorry to take you around in so many circles, but my only purpose is to convince you that the reduction of corruption is possible, and one of the sure ways to do that is to remove discretion by installing automation. Even if I would say that I am a passionate advocate of automation, I would also say that that is not really enough, because people could do more than what machines could do. If only there would be more people who would stop being corruptors, there would also be more people who would stop being grafters. How I really wish that there would be more automation in the government, but better than that, we should really have more values formation among our people, so that less of them would become the corruptors.

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