The surfeit of opinion to the effect that as major oil-driven state-funded projects across the sectors increase, more aggressive and more costly surges of bribery, corruption and nepotism will assail the state system is not a concern which the Irfaan Ali administration should take lightly. The reality here, is that the practice of what is known as mordida, is embedded in the state tender system, and as it happens, the country’s Chief Executive does not enjoy the option of simply looking the other way.
Long before petro dollars began to flow into greater numbers of ‘big money’ state undertakings that now allow for the deeper desecration of the state tender system, dark clouds had already been billowing over the entire process. The advent of ‘oil money’ to splash around simply means that there is much more at stake these days. And why not? After all, not only is the infrastructure that facilitates kickbacks already buried in the state tender system, but more projects across more sectors will mean that those functionaries who, on the one hand, administer the state tender system and, on the other, those who execute the contracts, are only too aware of the fact that the ‘feeding trough’ has, with the advent of oil monies, been generously refilled and that both the incentive and the opportunity now exist for larger amounts to be ‘creamed off’ and committed to bribes and kickbacks, given that the country’s development trajectory has already begun to become adjusted as much more is done much more quickly.
There has never been a time in our country’s recent history, where any political administration has taken concerted steps to put the boot down on the issue of bribes and kickbacks, that are now embedded in the state tender system. In other words, indifference to the practice, which very much appears to be the prevailing position, is by no means a remedy. The concerns over the practice and the manner in which it is compromising the projects in question in the various reports of the Auditor General, as well as the periodic media reports that appear whenever seemingly blatant instance of tender irregularities surface have not appeared to cause government to take the problem more seriously.
Truth be told, the portents for the eradication of bribes in the state tender system any time soon are not, as things stand, particularly good. The reality is that state-funded projects in the various sectors are likely to increase now that there are more resources around with which to make them happen. At the same time the fact that there has been no indication of official preparedness to seriously clamp down on the practice is particularly discouraging.
In fact, if some of the instances of the blatant mishandling of tenders by state functionaries who have a role to play in the process is anything to go by, the irregularities in the system are protected by ‘minders’ who are sufficiently influential as to make those irregularities themselves go away. What is significant is that, over time, government has made no really meaningful effort to seek to seriously re-examine and overhaul the tender process in a manner that pays specific and forensic attention to grafting mechanisms onto the existing tender regime that speak specifically to matters pertaining to how the procedures must work. Indeed, it very much appears that over time, corruption-driven state tender anomalies and infractions have become routinized, leading one to believe that the loopholes that facilitate those infractions benefit from their own powerful gatekeepers.
Here, it is apposite to note, that the disfigurement of the state tender process has been, elsewhere, among resource-rich countries, a critical element in the overall resource curse landscape. It has become a particularly serious problem in many developing countries that are rich in oil and other natural resources, and has been, over time, central to providing an explanation as to why these countries, their natural resource-based wealth notwithstanding, end up performing so badly. The reality here is that corruption in resource-rich countries is, frequently, both political and bureaucratic in nature, centred around both facilitating by turning a blind eye (or providing ‘cover’) at the political level and the actual perpetration of the corrupt acts by lower-level functionaries possessed of a hands-on hold on the system.
