WATANI International
1 August 2010
Reports released by international and domestic organisations have shown Egypt to be among the top corrupt nations on earth. However shocking this may sound, bribing civil servants has become the norm in Egypt. In its Global Corruption report 2009, Transparency International attributes Egypt’s limited ability to fight corruption to the lack or outright absence of accountability of public executives, the limited freedom of access to information, and inefficient tools to monitor budget allocations. As for the public sector, it is riddled with corruption given the plethora of loopholes in the regulations that govern it.
Inferior salaries
Nabil Helmy, former dean of Zagazig University’s law school and member of the National Council for Human Rights, argues that the low salaries of public employees are a major factor behind rampant corruption. “Something should be urgently done,” he told Watani. “A bill reconsidering wages and salaries should be passed. Legislation should be modified to allow managers to instantly dismiss employees caught in corruptive practices. Right now, penalising someone implicated in corruption requires lengthy, complicated procedures. Accountability is severely hampered.”
Dr Helmy stresses the significance of wider e-government in fighting corruption. When government services are provided via the Internet, he explains, there is little room for corruptive practices since direct interaction between government employees and the public is reduced to a minimum.
Lenient monitoring
“Corruption is augmented by leniency on the part of monitoring agencies,” Hamdy Abdel Azim, former head of the Sadat Academy says. “More often than not, these agencies take their time just to initiate investigation in corruption claims, then conduct the investigation at a leisurely pace. Further compounding the situation are high inflation rates and low salaries. Employees claim they have no option but to take bribes in order to make ends meet.”
Yet corruption results in widespread social diseases, Dr Abdel Azim argues. Productivity is undermined, public money is misused, treatment costs covered by the State are augmented, to mention but a few.
Ruining society
But Egypt is hardly unique. Hoda Zakariya, political sociology professor at Zagazig University, reminds that corruption is a worldwide phenomenon. “No human society is void of corruption,” she says. “But corruption stands to ruin societies. It leads to favouritism and the exclusion of efficient and honest people from responsibility posts. This hinders a society’s development and exacerbates social inequality.
“Rampant as it is,” Dr Zakariya says, “corruption is not restricted but covers a wide-range of areas. It ranges from giving a few pounds to a government employee in return for a small service to offering millions of pounds to a high-ranking official to approve the burying of nuclear waste. Corruption extends vertically, from people at the very bottom to those at the upper echelon of society. Further aggravating the situation is the fact that those who stand up to corruption are usually victimised.”
Poverty is innocent
For his part, chairman of the board of directors of the Egyptian Association for Community Participation Enhancement Magdy Abdel-Hamid says his society’s report on corruption in 2008 revealed shocking levels of corruption in municipalities where district engineers commonly receive large bribes to grant licences for defective buildings. The ministries of health and education are also fertile grounds for corruption.
Dr Abdel-Hamid dismisses the presence of a direct correlation between poverty and corruption: “We found that among those accused of receiving bribes are employees with incomes as high as EGP50,000 a month. We now have an overall system of corruption”, he says.
“However sincere the efforts to combat corruption, they focus on containing the symptoms rather than curing the disease,” says Saïd Abdel-Hafez who heads the Forum for Development and Human Rights Dialogue. Abdel-Hafez stresses that, for corruption to be properly combated legislative obstacles hampering NGOs’ fight against corruption should be eliminated; unfettered access to information secured; whistle blowers protected; and a new relationship based upon confidence should be fostered between municipalities and the public.
Egyptians against corruption
The movement Egyptians Against Corruption was formed a few years ago to encourage people to play an active role in confronting corruption. Buthaina Kamel, renowned TV presenter and the movement’s coordinator, told Watani that “to encourage Egyptians to combat corruption, the movement grants a EGP5000 annual prize to someone who takes courageous action to stand up to corruption. The money is collected from ordinary people who buy a pin with the slogan ‘Against Corruption’. The winner is chosen through voting on the movement’s website http://www.nadafa.org.”