by SARAH BRACKING
What is private sector corruption? A flippant answer would be anything that the losing party in a job or tender selection process says it is, since there is that old saying that one person’s corruption (or patronage, nepotism) is another’s rightful meritocracy!1
Time for a re-evaluation and new market rules?
Of course the meritocratic selection based on ‘natural intelligence’ and ‘expertise’ is always cited by the winner – but perhaps generally more vociferously by male winners! Certainly with tender processes so complex, and firm structures so opaque, it is hard to work out what corruption is these days. One thing is clear, whatever it constitutes, its outcome is inequity, since people who navigate well the public/private sector ‘revolving door’ are getting very rich. But are we to worry? No, as the World Bank repeatedly tells us, or at least not very much, since according to them since 19972, corruption only happens in the public sector when public sector workers, those most devious of pathologised creatures in World Bank texts, take from the public purse for private gain. The action is one way, implying that you have to be in the public sector to be able to ‘do’ corruption. But a quick review of corruption scandals in South Africa this past year shows many firms doing just that – taking public subsidy which then ‘disappears’ into private accounts!
Traditional ways of looking at corruption in the private sector also blame the public sector. If you look at the US Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (1977), the OECD Convention on Combating Bribery of Foreign Public Officials in International Business Transactions (even the title gives it away) or the soft law Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative you get the sense that private sector corruption only happens at the boundary of the firm when it interacts with – yes, you have it – those devious public sector people, who won’t do their job without a bribe. A good example of this genre of World Bank storytelling is Silent and Lethal (referring to ‘quiet corruption’) whose main villains are absentee teachers and doctors. Thus corruption, for the World Bank, does not appear to actually exist between two private actors (rather like the first British Queen Victoria’s view of lesbianism when she outlawed sex between men, allegedly), or within the firm itself. How convenient. And yet, taking money from the public sector by capturing a subsidy or a bailout – the banks on a grander scale in 2008 – seems to be the order of the day.
Africa Report for more