Former Housing Minister Ibrahim Suleiman was sentenced to eight years in prison and fined LE2.8 billion on Thursday for his role in facilitating corrupt land deals while he served in Hosni Mubarak’s cabinet, joining several other former regime figures who have been sentenced.
But according to a group of international economists and experts who gathered last week in Cairo for the Economic Research Forum’s 18th annual conference on corruption and economic development, trials like Suleiman’s will not be sufficient to reverse the effects of decades of corruption on Egypt’s political culture.
“It’s hard to include penalties that are big enough to offset the enormous gains they can make if they’re corrupt. [It is important] to insist on processes which squeeze out the opportunity for corruption,” Paul Collier, an Oxford University economics professor and the author of “The Bottom Billion,” said at the conference.
The problem lies deeper and requires fundamentally changing the structures of public institutions, not just applying codes and penalties. And, many corruption experts say, a transition to electoral democracy alone will not ensure that structural change takes place.
“Democracy is not an anti-corruption tool,” said Mushtaq Khan, a professor of Institutional Economics at the School of Oriental and African Sciences in London, who attended the conference. Khan said that even democratic governance can be used to favor the ruling elite if they are still able to distribute benefits and access to public institutions to their cronies. Reorganizing “patron-client” relations in a more formal sense takes time.
Khan pointed to the example of India, where, despite having a robust electoral democracy, the ability of the ruling class to use their positions in distributing benefits persists due to continuing clientalism and corruption-friendly structures in government.
With the culture of political corruption so entrenched in society, it wouldn't be practical to assume that it could change with the simple introduction of democracy as a process, according to Khan. “You are not going to enforce a social order that does not exist,” he said.
Despite the perceived existence of tools to ensure democracy and to penalize those who obstruct the process, as evidenced by the convictions of former regime officials, shifting paradigms to an accountable and accessible public sector will take a much more comprehensive process.
Reversing corrupt practices in a society requires a change of societal values, which could happen vis-à-vis educating a new generation, Collier says.
On Wednesday, Foreign Trade and Industry Minister Mahmoud Issa launched an initiative to combat corruption in the private sector and public sector practices that encourage corruption. In his initiative, Issa aims to reverse some of the corrupt practices of the former regime by creating a whistle-blowing mechanism against government corruption and encouraging members of the private sector to report government employees who are corrupt. The initiative also aims to limit conflict of interest between the public and private spheres by limiting allowed levels of interaction.
A part of Issa’s new initiative includes offering classes to workers in the public sector to teach them methods of combating corruption and the values associated with avoiding it.
Daniel Kaufmann, a fellow at the Brookings Institution, however, argued that value-based education needs to begin at the school level. “The only reason why I remember to recycle is because my daughter, when she was young, learned of its importance and made me do it. There is no way you can say you will teach someone new values at the age of 40,” he said.
Sometimes, an institution can be so hopelessly corrupted that it would be difficult to rectify. One remedy for this, Kaufmann argues, is to get rid of the institution altogether. He cited Georgia, where after the so-called Rose Revolution President Mikheil Saakashvili abolished the traffic police department after finding out that it was the most corrupt organization in the government. In Egypt, the National Democratic Party (NDP) was abolished, but a vast majority of its members are still allowed to be involved in politics.
In fact, corruption, defined by American University in Cairo President Lisa Anderson as the diversion of goods from the public sphere for private gain, can be a tool that can help an individual advance politically in countries with certain structures. “Those who accept the gifts, usually go on to politics,” said Jeffrey Nugent from the University of South Carolina at the ERF conference.
One reason why corruption is not so easily uprooted in countries in transition, such as Egypt, is that it is not seen as the biggest problem within a changing society. Egyptians have cited unemployment and poverty as bigger problems than corruption.
Despite corruption incurring large costs on communities — Kaufmann measures that high-corruption countries have the lowest GDP — Khan argues that high-growth developing countries tend to also have high levels of corruption. More developed countries tend to have a larger tax base and formal economy from which to redistribute public benefits. Less developed countries do not have the same luxury, and so, according to Khan, must redistribute these informally in a way that falls into the definition of corruption. The lack of an alternative to corrupt societies may alter public perception against the need to rid their countries of corruption.
Many of the academics assume that presently it would not be wise to assume that profound change has taken place with regard to public officials’ corruption because they are used to benefits outside the realm of politics and accountability, and it would, paradoxically, be incumbent on them to enforce much of the oversight meant to curb corruption.
Last week, Egyptian newspapers were filled with calls for amnesty for corrupt public officials who agreed to inject substantial amounts of money into public accounts from their private wealth, gained ostensibly by corrupt means. One such person is steel tycoon and former NDP strongman Ahmed Ezz.
“Some countries have a low perception of corruption in politics because there is no politics,” Khan said. According to Kaufmann, this may be rectified merely by competitiveness in the political arena, which would only happen with wider participation.
However, despite this “low perception,” Anderson sees signs of a desire to search for new structures that would ensure a less corrupt public sphere.
“I see the calls for Islamic law in the country as a call for law in general that applies to everyone…from a constituency that hasn’t been able to avail itself to any rule of law,” she said. This could be a good or bad thing, Collier said. In 19th century England, religious resurgence helped turn the country from the most corrupt in the world to one of the most honest in governance. “It’s similar in Egypt, but it must be harnessed correctly,” he said.
