In Zimbabwe, mention of the word “corruption” generally excites imagination of the elite and powerful flouting tender procedures to make fortunes, stealing millions from public entities and employing cronies and relatives, for instance.
corruptionwatch WITH TAWANDA MAJONI
This, of course, would always be a limited understanding of corruption, which is also common within community grassroots. Just that the monetary amounts involved are typically small when taken in isolation and are, mostly dismissed as inconsequential. Worse still, suffering community members seem to have accepted this low-life type of corruption as part of the social fabric. The truth, of course, is that grassroots corruption is a big problem whose socio-economic consequences are dire even though they appear insignificant in the short term.
Grassroots corruption entails influential individuals within communities abusing their positions for selfish gain. A headmaster and school development committee members deliberately excluding orphans and vulnerable children from the Basic Education Assistance Module (Beam) and accepting their own children on the programme are acting corruptly. So are local municipal officers manipulating the housing waiting list to benefit their families and friends or strangers who are prepared to give them kickbacks.
This type of corruption takes numerous other forms, most common among them being:
Local politicians and businesspeople duping poor and desperate home seekers to pay for residential stands on land that they don’t own and is designated for other purposes Municipal refuse collectors and power utility employees directly and indirectly forcing residents to pay money for services for which they already pay through prescribed rates Municipal and national police details regularly raiding suburban vendors and collecting bribes to let them continue operating from illegal stalls or spaces
Traditional leaders selling communally owned land or allocating free plots to their relatives and friends and excluding perceived foes from social protection programmes
Local authorities or rogue employees imposing illegal fees and fines on transport operators and vendors
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These forms of corruption are rife in urban, peri-urban and rural areas. Clearly, their effects are huge and far-reaching even though this may not be immediately obvious in most cases. Their net effect is to perpetuate poverty, misery and vulnerability. Take the orphan in a child-headed family who is deliberately excluded from Beam. His or her hopes of earning an education are undermined. He or she will highly likely end up a criminal or vendor who will suffer the same corruption in adult life.
Grassroots corruption persists because the victims are poor, hardly have a voice, lack necessary literacy and awareness and can easily be intimidated into submission or silence. That makes their situation particularly sorry because, ordinarily, they would have to depend on the very people who abuse them for rescue.
The captivating irony, on the other hand, is that community members are a very potent tool against grassroots corruption, but only if they organise and mobilise themselves strongly enough and take action against their abusers. True, they may have to do with initial or seed help from civil society, churches and bona fide activists, but their strength lies in none but themselves and, ultimately, must emerge as the owners of the fight.
Bangladesh, a developing country like Zimbabwe, provides instructive evidence of community power in the fight against corruption. Transparency International Bangladesh activated the formation of more than 5 000 volunteer anti-corruption movements, which has also devolved to thousands of other activists fighting against grassroots corruption.
These activists who are spread throughout the country’s 60 provinces strive to promote local transparency and accountability as watchdog groups which mobilise other community members. They mostly focus on social services, among them education, health and local governance in a country where it is estimated that at least two thirds of the citizenry pay bribes to get essential services.
The anti-corruption groups employ several methods that have to date produced amazing results, and these include citizen report cards, complaints boxes and public lobby advocacy meetings. Transparency International Zimbabwe (TI-Z) started up something similar last year with a pilot project in Bulawayo. The local TI chapter says it will be using low-cost but high-impact strategies to fight corruption at the grassroots level. This involves community members monitoring local graft and exposing it by naming and shaming culprits.
It is too early to say what impact the TI-Z interventions would have on community level corruption, but the gesture is encouraging. What is crucial, as already mentioned, is to avoid the top-bottom approach which most civil society organisations are guilty of. They tend to come with ready-made solutions, approaches and methods that, ultimately, alienate the very communities that are meant to benefit through a truly participatory philosophy.
As has happened in Bangladesh and probably other countries, local communities can benefit immensely by taking the initiative to combat corruption as organised systems which can ride on several methods that have proved effective in other cases. Whistleblowing is a game changer if properly handled. Communities can use complaints boxes, yes, but these can be vandalised. Community members need to be educated on which key stations to approach when they have complaints, and how best to do that. These stations include police stations, residents’ associations, civil society organisations, heads of relevant departments where there is a good reason to believe they are professional and honest, and anti-corruption groups within the communities. Local lawmakers, councillors and other community leaders can also be used to pass on confidential information if they are trustworthy.
The main problem with Zimbabwean citizens is that they are risk-averse. When corruption occurs and they even have evidence, they are either too reluctant or afraid to take corrective action.
But this culture can change. Grassroots communities must form themselves into lobby groups that can even go to the extent of staging public demonstrations and protests against corruption. That means that they must get into a mode of civil resistance and disobedience against their abusers. That requires bravery that will develop with positive results in the anti-graft fight.
But the grassroots fight against corruption needs a firm social foundation. It would never be sustainable if the young ones are not socialised into morally upright citizens. That means families must teach their children how bad corruption, like other social vices, is. That also means schools must teach children to walk on the straight path and to know what the crooked path is like and how it can be straightened.
In this regard, the community groups must use their interactive engagements to encourage each other to inculcate morally acceptable values in the home, and to goad school and education authorities to take up corruption as part of the curriculum, formally or informally.
Tawanda Majoni is the national coordinator at Information for Development Trust (IDT), a non-profit organisation promoting access to information on public and private sector transparency and accountability, and can be contacted on [email protected]
