The Prosecution of Corruption As a Political Strategy* This Is a Rough

The Prosecution of Corruption as a Political Strategy* Daniel Zirker University of Waikato Hamilton, New Zealand *This paper has been prepared for presentation at the annual meeting of the IPPA, June 26-July 1, 2018, Pittsburg. I would likewould like to thank the administrator of political science at the University of Waikato, Frances Douch, and the Dean of Arts and Social Sciences, Allison Kirkman, for their help in facilitating the presentation of this paper. The conclusions of the paper, and the analyses herein, are my own. Abstract: The Prosecution of Corruption as a Political Strategy The prosecution of corruption in developing countries has received increasing attention as the understanding and technology of corruption abatement has improved, as per key scholars in the field (Klitgaard 1988; Rose-Ackermann 1999; Johnston 2005; Quah 2013; Lamsdorff, ) among others. Pressures from the World Bank and the IMF, as well as from foreign aid- granting agencies in Europe and North America, have encouraged a range of developing and more developed countries long beset with both 'need' and 'greed corruption' to show tangible results in their prosecution of corrupt practices. In a number of such countries (e.g., Tanzania, the BRICS countries), however, these prosecutions have apparently come to represent strategies in banal power struggles, show trials that remove potential rivals from political contention. This paper will compare and contrast cases in Tanzania and the BRICS countries, among others, in an effort to shed light on the apparently unintended, and even corrupting, effects of global pressures to reduce corruption, and the promise and pitfalls of such prosecutions in the context of domestic political contestation. This is a rough draft. Not for citation. “The road to hell is paved with good intentions.” Saint Bernard de Clairvaux (c. 1150) INTRODUCTION: MAKING SENSE OF ‘CORRUPTION’ The prosecutions of corruption in putatively higher corruption countries have received increasing attention as the understanding and measurement of corruption, the improvements in detection and technological abatement, have improved, as noted by a number of scholars in the field (e.g., Klitgaard 1988; Rose-Ackermann 1999; Johnston 2005; Quah 2013; Lamsdorff 1999) among others. Global pressures on countries to end corruption clearly stem from good intentions. Corruption is widely regarded as an expensive, disruptive and counter- productive influence upon national development. Pressures from Transparency International (TI), the World Bank, the United Nations, the IMF, the European Union, the OECD, privately-owned accounting firms as well as an additional range of NGOs, from foreign aid- granting agencies in Europe and North America to emerging ones in Asia and Latin America, have encouraged countries long beset with both 'need' and 'greed corruption' to show tangible results in their prosecution of corrupt practices. In a number of countries (e.g., Tanzania, the BRICS countries, and Saudi Arabia, the foci of this study), however, these prosecutions have often appeared to be focused upon political strategies, used as weapons in more banal power struggles, and as show trials for alleged “greed corruption,” where “need corruption” remains a critical problem. Such trials, moreover, routinely remove rival political persons from political contention. They “kill two birds with one stone,” as it were. Are such politically geared corruption trials inevitable in mid- to high-corruption countries in this age of rapidly advancing globalization? Are global pressures to prosecute corrupt politicians in effect actually intensifying corrupt practices? In terms of democracy and fairness, the “road to hell” would be lacking even the good intentions that had troubled Saint Bernard de Clairvaux if this were the case. 1 In most high profile corruption trials the criminal charges and/or allegations of criminal (greed) corruption that have been laid are typically weak, and counter arguments raised are typically allowed to die in the usually impotent, if not always openly compliant, media. While corruption, broadly construed, may be “ever present where power is wielded” (Friedrich, 1972: 141), and an inevitable condition in a neo-liberal global environment, corruption and perceptions of corruption are widely, if not universally,1 regarded as counter- developmental, delaying or stopping economic progress and reinforcing criminal behaviour in such societies. Corruption is by nature a secretive affair, however, and thus difficult to identify, and even more so to measure. The major categories of corruption, bribery, kickbacks, influence pedalling, nepotism, official fraud, election tampering, moreover, are widely regarded as anathema to liberal democratic societies, strictly policed in ‘least corrupt’ countries, and are at least technically illegal in almost all countries today. It appears to be the case that countries that are perceived (as ranked in the CPI) to have mid- to high-levels of corruption, and relatively low press freedom, seem to be experiencing an increasing number of corruption show trials, even though such countries often have a preponderance of what is referred to as “need corruption,” the required expenditure of low levels of resources as “user fees” to grossly underpaid bureaucrats, rather than “greed corruption,” large scale corrupt practices that have no apparent developmental value.2 Monika Bauhr contended in 2012, that Despite extensive international and national efforts to contain corruption, there are few successful anti-corruption programs. The major challenge for the anti- corruption industry is to understand the limited success and find more effective ways to deal with corruption (68) In the past two decades, global pressures to indict corrupt officials have grown exponentially, stimulated by, among other measures, the UN Convention against Corruption, or UNCaC, signed and ratified by most of the world’s countries, although compliance has been sketchy. The European Union’s Global pressures to address corruption have provided more corrupt countries with what appears to be a convenient tool in the inevitable struggle for 2 power, however. Indeed, elites who all-to-often regard their class interests as national interests, for example, and ‘administration [as] their personal fortress from which they direct the political and economic life of the nation’ (Friedrich, 1972: 145), may even (if not always) have the very best of intentions in their conduct of what are essentially corrupt, if nominally legal, practices. Others openly engage in graphically corrupt practices, protected, or so it may seem, by a prevalence of corruption in their respective societies. Sudden indictments, in these contexts, must seem shocking if not bizarre. International pressures typically suggest that these indictments stem from ‘good intentions.’ Such ‘good intentions’, however, seemingly directed by neo-liberal ideology, which is typically at odds with local culture and even electoral democracies (and their quasi-authoritarian emphasis on equality and transparency) may well represent the ‘road to political hell’, to borrow from Saint Bernard de Clairvaux’s phraseology. The following study attempts to clarify with key examples, the strategically political use of corruption prosecutions that often predominates in significantly corrupt societies, in the use of anti-corruption indictments both as instruments to alleviate international anti- corruption pressures, and as effective devices for the removal of rival politicians. Corruption and Political Corruption Corruption is, by nature, largely secretive, subject to various (and contrasting) understandings, and hence very difficult to measure. Sample surveys, the bases of both the CPI and the GCB, are often questionable, given the vulnerability of honest responses to punishment. The reality and measurement of corruption as a social construct has necessarily come to be closely tied, then, to perceptions, the easiest and most apparent understanding of the many phenomena that are grouped under the nomenclature of corruption (Lambsdorff 1999). The surveys that the CPI uses to determine the CPI ranking represent an inexact (perhaps of questionable validity in an absolute sense), but relatively reliable basis for 3 measurement, at least in the national rankings. It is important to emphasize that the CPI choice of surveys for specific countries, and its algorithm change periodically, making the raw CPI data impossible to compare, although the national rankings do provide an interesting and reliable ordinal data set. They mostly depend upon the perceptions of business people.3 The argument made by Johan Lambsdorff, one of the original formulators of the CPI algorithm, is that the highest degree of validity (as well as reliability) in predicting relative levels of corruption, narrowly and legally defined, can only be achieved in the measurement of elite perceptions (of white-collar business people, the focus of most of the major international surveys used by TI),4 as he explains in a major macro-analysis of the literature (Lambsdorff 1999). Corruption is typically defined assuming one of five expressions, all of which are seen to be primarily damaging to political systems. Corruption, in its strict definition, is limited as we have noted (above) to actions or reactions of public officials. Considered individually, individuated as it were, without wider implications for a society, most instances of corruption are relatively innocuous

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