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The Flip Sides of Corruption | 51 Life is anchored in human consciousness of the self and of the environmental factors pivotal to the provision and receipt of the goods and services necessary for livelihood. However, that experience comes with various challenges. The first is how to sustain a livelihood given the presence of inflated personal desires, the propensity for competition and the paucity of resources worldwide. Our environment exposes us to natural and manufactured deprivations of life-supporting elements, namely food, shelter, clothing and political freedom. The second challenge is how to ensure an equitable supply of life’s needs and maintain a balanced satisfaction among the beneficiaries of an environment characterised by inflated egos and where there is competition to have more than one needs. At the same time, the provision of goods and services requires the skills to manage diversity and ensure transparency, efficiency, fairness, and effective delivery systems. These are important elements that generally guarantee satisfaction. Ideally, these elements should be supported by social and economic control systems designed to ensure the attainment of both individual and collective objectives in ways that ensure peaceful coexistence attained through good governance. The administration and management of societal affairs need to be performed with the consent and direct participation of the electorate or representatives thereof. Therefore, society needs elected or appointed leaders vested with the power and authority to drive the processes designed to provide goods and services to society. That leadership responsibility recalls Parenti’s well-known statement: Where power is derived from the loyalty of others and wealth from the labour of others; where many citizens’ failure is other people’s success; and where noble intentions and ignoble effects exist in equal abundance, the power of a man is his present means to obtain some future good.1 To that end, experience has proven that there is great temptation for public servants to bend official rules and regulations (where they exist) for friends and other benefactors, thereby making most bureaucracies worldwide either slightly or egregiously corrupt.2 They use the power that they have, the power invested in the positions that they hold, as means to bend the rules for personal benefit. Hence, personal gain, allegiance to community norms and practices, organisational The Flip Sides of Corruption: A Challenge to Developing Countries Tapera O Chirawu 2 Chapter 52 | The Africana World: From Fragmentation to Unity and Renaissance compulsions, political trappings, demands for national security, national development through international collaboration and economic pressure could be said to be the factors that promote corruption. 2.1 DeÑning Corruption There are several ways of defining corruption. Some social-science authorities say that corruption is the use of public office for private/personal gain; government systems without competition; the privatisation of politics so that it concerns the distribution of benefits from economic transactions; and demanding additional payment for services that one is already officially paid for.3 The Business Dictionary defines it as an act of ‘giving or obtaining advantage through means which are illegitimate, immoral, and/or inconsistent with one’s duty or the rights of others, [and] often results from patronage’.4 Generally, corruption can be loosely defined as initiation of transaction of goods and/or services to benefit the initiator, persons, or organisations of her/his choice. That includes one’s government. Goldstein refers to it as ‘a kind of politics in that it concerns the distribution of benefits from economic transactions (exchange and capital acculation)’.5 Corruption,itisknown,permeatesalllevelsofsociety,affectsmanyorganisations and influences foreign policy. One of its key characteristics is that it is immoral and unethical because it denies citizens important social and economic opportunities, and results in short- and long-term physical and psychological damage to those deprived of their rights, thereby causing destitution for many, and material gains for a few. This creates a situation where many citizens fail and a few succeed.6 That means corruption exists within a structured environment where social, political and economic power relations instrumentally determine who gets what, when, how much and for how long. Corruption is, therefore, inseparable from society’s requirements for daily existence – professional opportunities, land ownership and delivery and receipt of a wide range of goods and services. The other characteristic of corruption is its victims’ explicit willingness to pay in order to get something so that they can survive. Corruption occurs in an environment where there are either no...

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