The Corruption Surprise

Today The Progressive Bangladesh, a magazine of progressive Bangladeshi thought, published an article co-authored by me and Umme Perveen Iftikhar on the recent Transparency International report on Bangladesh. The article expands on the post I wrote last week entitled "The Myth Of The Anti-Corruption Drive".

Excerpts:

The Corruption Surprise
By Mashuqur Rahman and Umme Perveen Iftikhar

When Transparency International published its Corruption Perceptions Index—or CPI—for 2007, the leading English daily in Bangladesh greeted the news with a deliberately positive headline: “Bangladesh improves on its graft image: Climbs up to 7th position from bottom of TI’s corruption index.” Indeed it is an improvement, considering that Bangladesh had tied for the third lowest spot last year.

What’s important, position or perception?

The perception that underlies Bangladesh’s gain in rank remains exactly the same as before. Both in 2006 and in 2007 Bangladesh received a CPI score of 2.0. In other words, Bangladesh showed no improvement in corruption between 2006 and 2007. The country’s ranking improved only because seven countries of the world became more corrupt this year: Cambodia, Central African Republic, Papua New Guinea, Turkmenistan, Venezuela, Equatorial Guinea and Laos. In addition, four new countries (Afghanistan, Tonga, Uzbekistan and Somalia), also with worse corruption than Bangladesh, were added as new entrants to the list.

Policymakers and the media engaged in a hair-splitting exercise to figure out what’s more important, the rank or the score. But given the self-censorship in the country, few had the courage to say outright that the rank is an outcome of indexing. What is important is that the perception of corruption in Bangladesh remains as strongly negative as before.

That conclusion, not made forcefully in public, would be an embarrassment to the caretaker government, which has been fighting a “war on corruption.” Indeed, like authoritarian governments almost everywhere, it legitimizes its existence primarily to its anti-corruption drive. Cleaning up politics is the pretext on which it has stretched the limits of constitutional interpretation by delaying the election date till the end of 2008. But now the world’s leading corruption watchdog comes out to say essentially that the anti-corruption effort has had little or no effect so far. How can this be tackled?

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