Poor people more likely to pay bribes

Last week, a tiny classified advert in the Daily Nation set Kenyans on Twitter ablaze. It sat benignly, tucked in between adverts for tippers and gasoline water pumps, almost charming in its sincerity: “Join corruption cartels and win government supply tenders without sweat.”

There was a phone number to call, which was engaged the whole of Friday, the day the classified appeared. Those three lines seem to suggest that we are now in a strangely post-war-on-corruption dystopia, where the smoke and mirrors are gone, and corruption has been rehabilitated into an honest community effort, like a chama or a merry-go-round.

And the fact that it appeared in the classifieds — the least glitzy part of the newspaper, where the raw and unwashed also have a seat at the table — suggest corruption has achieved a strange democratisation. But it remains exhausting to talk about corruption in this country. President Uhuru Kenyatta himself seems to be the most exhausted of all, mustering only blustering “fury” from time to time. More broadly, corruption is apparently such a pervasive feature of being an African that it almost banal.

Some have even gone to the extent of declaring that corruption is not just endemic but an integral part of the social fabric of life [in Africa]. In other words, corruption isn’t how Africa fails, it is how Africa works. Far from being a devious and opportunistic act, corruption may be the glue that holds our fractious societies together and makes our nation-states possible.

Stripped down to its essentials, people only have a vested interest in the continued existence of an entity called “Kenya”, “Uganda”, “Nigeria” and so on, because as long as it exists, there is a chance to benefit from its largesse. So there’s no real incentive to overhaul and clean up the system, and come down hard on the corrupt — you might be “spoiling” your own chances in the future.

Perceptions matter, and when the dominant view that a society is in the grip of shadowy cartels that can snatch anyone from a street corner, the cultural expectation is that “everybody” pays a bribe. In my view, this becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy that overrides any ethical objections that individuals may personally have about bribing or taking bribes.

The result is a low-level equilibrium trap in which public officials and those seeking services have an incentive to collectively maintain a “moral economy of corruption”, in the words of anthropologist Jean-Pierre Olivier de Sardan.

But one paper from regional research project Afrobarometer reveals that corruption — and especially in its most salient form, bribery — is not this inescapable, all-encompassing aspect of Africanness. Among 25,397 Afrobarometer respondents in 18 countries, 26 per cent reported paying a bribe in the past one year, while 74 per cent did not. So people who actually pay bribes are in the clear minority.

The researchers dig deep into why some people pay bribes, and others don’t, revealing some of the unlikely contradictions that shape African life. Anyone who has ever been shaken down for a bribe knows that the whole thing is a psychological wrestling match to see who blinks first — it’s a cost-benefit calculation to decide if that “kitu kidogo” is worth being hauled through the courts for, or standing in a queue tomorrow and the next day.

The study reveals that being educated, or not, had no impact on whether someone would pay a bribe or not. They found that it was poverty — not education — that had a greater influence on bribery.

Wealthy people

Poor people were more likely to pay bribes, not because they are “more corrupt” in that blunt sense, or because they were ignorant of the law, but simply because they have more contact with the state. They take their children to public schools, seek treatment in public hospitals, and walk on foot past menacing local government police sitting under a kibanda who will shake them down for the potatoes they are carrying to the market.

Holding all other effects constant, each one-unit increase in the degree of poverty on the five-point scale increases the odds of paying a bribe by 15 per cent, the research indicates. Wealthier people, on the other hand, can afford to opt out of the crumbling public system; their children learn in private schools and they see private doctors.

Even when they seek public services — such as getting a birth certificate or business licence — they can send an employee or relative to run the errand for them. And a junior official may be less enthusiastic shaking down a lowly messenger. So, in absolute terms, wealthy people just don’t interact with the state as often as poor people do, and are therefore “less corrupt” simply as a matter of fewer opportunities to be so.

But the great equaliser is the African road. Wealthy people are far more likely to drive private cars, and so are frequently targeted for bribes on the road because the police know that they can afford to pay them. Women are slightly less likely to bribe than men are, again, not necessarily because they are more conscientious, but because they tend to have less contact with the state. In many family and business set-ups, dealing with the police and getting permits is usually left to men.

The same goes for older people, who don’t need to get permits or certificates. Their lack of contact with the state insulates them from extraction opportunities, except perhaps if they are chasing their pensions. And people in cities have more access to social services than those in the rural areas, which now ratchets up the shake-down opportunities. You may be coerced to part with something as you are trying to enrol your child in school — but thankfully, there is a school in the first place, right?

Expand services

In the end, the “most corrupt” African is the one who is most in contact with the state — they are likely to be male, young, urban and poor.

And conversely, the “least corrupt” is probably a rich, old lady living a quiet life upcountry!

What is it about the nature of our political structures that mere contact with the state risks tainting one with streaks of dirty money, whether or not you are explicitly looking to “join the cartels”?

It probably has its roots in the founding logic of the African nation-state in the form we know it today. Colonialism was a system based on nothing but plunder and extraction, achieved through various political and legal instruments whose purpose was chanelling the wealth of many into the hands of the few.

And now, we have a national elite composed mostly of people with no significant skills other than piracy. Which is why it is great news when the Government expands “services” to the people, and perhaps why roads in particular are launched with such fanfare. But I know it comes with a dark side.

—Christine Mungai is a writer, journalist and executive editor of Africa data visualiser and explainer site Africapedia.com, Twitter: @chris_mungai