In global politics the concepts such as ‘patronage politics’, ‘spoils system’, and ‘padrino system’, have evolved from the nature of diversity of political engagement.
In unison they denote situations where political parties or high profile persons in the political circles offer as rewards to their supporters, government job, contracts and other benefits in exchange for their loyalty and help to win in elections alongside attaining the benefits that come from such.
Africa as a continent is unfortunately, according to experts in politics and economics, the global epicentre of corrupt politics wherein in most cases the ‘quid pro quo’ or ‘something for something’ modality is manifested in broad daylight.
Those who perpetrate corrupt politics often go scot-free given their manipulative powers.
While it is a shared desire of ours as a people to have leaders with integrity it is a fact that people do not mysteriously attain integrity after becoming leaders.
Leaders with integrity are first persons with integrity. In the absence of a person with integrity, government office has no power to imbue such a quality in the person.
There is no country with a smoothly functioning governing system built on pillars of systemic corruption. What corruption does is it creates a vicious cycle which taken into the loop more and more people, and forcibly, to make ends meet, make them partisans of the corrupt system in more and more diversified varieties of corruption.
Either way, corruption in the lower levels is a predicative manifestation of even more corruption above, in both magnitude and variety.
Some will be forced to participate as criminals, fraudulent brokers, assistants to the oppressors, falsifiers and forgers, and worse some will be the direct barricades to justice, fairness and peace, to mention a few.
In our local Tanzanian slang, for context, we call this ‘Uchawa’ where people sacrifice their true belief in good governance and choose to be ‘praise and worship chorus’ for leaders, clinging on them regardless of their stands, just to get money from them.
The result of this is what experts call “a failed state” wherein the government will have no more control due to the extremely weakened political and socioeconomic systems.
In a failed state justice hangs in the powers of the leaders who have assumed absolute powers out of the authority vested on them to lead and safeguard jealously the people and wealth of the nation as common good.
In a failed state violence and brutality is widespread, and it goes down to the lower levels where even personal differences are resolved by gunshots.
Failed states have endless incomplete lists of lives that are not accounted for, especially those who ask right questions regarding the state of affairs in their countries. Many of those have been forced to disappear because their ideas frighten the leaders.
These failed states are all over the world, warring for decades because someone or a group of people manipulated fair governance, leaving those countries ungovernable.
This is because those in power hold on to it as their personal entitlement against the good of the people which should have been internalized in their very conception of public leadership.
If we are a nation that envisions true growth we need independent structures that call people for questioning, and which fairly reward good work and punish wrongdoing.
It is these structures that will eventually form a generation with a deeper sense of integrity and nation-building.
Imagine a country where no government official is subjected to scrutiny and prosecution even amidst discrepancies in Auditor General Reports, public complaints about mysterious brutal criminality such as in cases of disappeared persons, media suppression, etc. Somewhere else these signs have preceded ‘failed states.’
It is crucial to discuss these issues as we are heading towards elections. Elections are a test of integrity, which entails among other things fairness, truthfulness, a deeper and personal sense of justice and goodwill, and a willingness to accept fair competition, due process and even defeat.
Election is a voice of the people, and suppressing its functioning or manipulating it is unacceptable as such manipulations work against the very purpose of our being called a free and fair nation.
Alongside that, it is time we envision as a nations what I can call systemic reforms that will starve and dry off the creeping tentacles of corrupt patronage politics manifested as nepotism in its bigger sense.
When nepotism becomes a norm, with certain families or big names managing the affairs of the whole country, accountability is defeated.
For example, an in-law of a minister who is a commissioner cannot hold accountable his own nephew for corruption. It becomes family business and a clandestine corruption web.
Shimbo Pastory is a student of the Loyola School of Theology, Ateneo de Manila University, Manila, the Philippines. Website: www.shimbopastory.com
