Petty corruption is killing us too

If we were to do a comparative word count of all the words we use in our public discourse, I am convinced that the word “corruption” would be among the top five words we use often.

There are many ways to visualise corruption and its effect on us. It is like a second skin; we wear it everywhere we go but unlike a snake’s skin, we have not shed this ugly covering ever since it was acquired. Instead, it grows nastier by the day.

When we think of corruption, our minds go to the big headline incidents and allegations now made famous by an alphabets soup of infamy: GYEEDA, SADA and several code words such as “guinea fowl” and “judgement debts” whose implicated meanings are lost to non-Ghanaians. 

When we think of the perpetrators of corruption, our minds go to the big league players whose combined theft over the last half century has prevented our country from being the shining Black Star seen from outer space.

However, corruption comes in many packages and its perpetrators are not some hideous army of enemy invaders; they are not only the big name “stealers” we think about and accuse with glee. 

When I think of corruption in this way, my mind goes to a gimmick I saw at the Bronx Zoo in New York many years ago. They had placed a mirror on the front of a cage among the row of cages that housed the big animals such as lions and tigers. 

This was written at the top of the cage with the mirror: YOU ARE LOOKING AT THE MOST DANGEROUS ANIMAL IN THE WORLD. It took a few seconds to realise that you were looking at yourself. 

To coin an advertising slogan out of this, let us say: “corruption is us”! However, to distinguish between the big league stealing and the rampant but equally potent danger of everyday thievery, let us call the phenomenon I am talking about here PETTY CORRUPTION. 

Make no mistake, petty corruption is deadly. It is like the drip-drip of a leaking pipe. At the end of the day, it would amount to a lot of lost water, perhaps equal to the wastage from a big burst. 

To give you an example of petty corruption, come with me into a pharmacy somewhere at Osu in Accra. 

A well-dressed gentleman (let us call him a gentleman solely based on his outer appearance) comes in and buys a lot of grocery – biscuits, soft drinks, milk, sugar, washing up liquid and the usual household stuff. 

The person at the checkout counter does the sums and tells him his bill. He pauses then asks the counter person, “can’t you put it on the receipt?”.

For a moment I can see a flash of disgust on the face of the salesperson but it vanishes quickly as the receipt is issued to this person who in my view was now a “former gentleman”.

After waiting for other customers to leave, I decided to find out a bit more about what I had just seen because in that moment of disgust in the sales person’s face, I could sense a story worth exploring. It is a huge scam. 

This is how it works: employees in the state sector and in many private businesses are reimbursed for medical expenses including the purchase of medicines. 

What they do is to go to a pharmacy and buy items other than medicines but collude with the shop workers to write a receipt for medicines which they can now present for reimbursement.

I asked whether this was a widespread practice. The reply was: “massive”. According to the salesperson, this practice goes on every day as scores of people come for such receipts. 

“We don’t want to do it but sales are down so you are lucky to get anyone walking to buy stuff. In any case, if you don’t do it, another shop will, so what can we do?”

On the question of “what can we do?” most of us have already thrown up our hands in despair, not only at the scale of the problem but because we all wear this second skin. 

Corruption is us! We now take it for granted that at some point in our lives if we have to deal with officialdom in any shape or form, we have to pay a bribe. This has become part of both our unconscious and conscious thinking to a dangerous degree. 

Recently, a young man approached me to help him find a job. I asked him if he had been checking the newspaper and online adverts. He laughed at me as if I was a joke. He stepped back and laughed again. Uncle, he said, “those adverts are just for show.” Nothing I said could convince him that the adverts were genuine and that people found jobs through them all the time. 

His conviction was based on the widespread belief that one cannot find a job without influencing someone in some way. 

When the youth get this idea injected into their bloodstream, this nation is in more trouble than we care to acknowledge.

There is another insidious form of corruption but which is excluded from the bracket. This is gaining something for nothing. I have come to the conclusion that the Ghanaian’s default position is to be paid for doing nothing. 

Let me illustrate this with another recent example. As anyone living in Accra can see, many policemen and women have been deployed around the city, usually standing by a parked vehicle or sitting in it. 

Last Sunday at around two o’clock in the afternoon, I drove past the Dzorwulu Junction on the Bush Highway and noticed that after the traffic light turned red more than four vehicles went past even under the noses of the police.

In addition to the cars, there were young men riding motorbikes who did not even care to stop. I was intrigued by the complete lack of attention of the police to what was happening literally under their watch so I stopped to have a chat with them. I was very polite. I asked them what their orders were as they were brought to that junction. 

They looked at me blankly as if I had asked them for the name of the President of Serbia and Montenegro. I expanded on the question by asking them whether arresting drivers going through the red and riders without helmet were part of their jobs.

They said yes. They then went into a long tirade of why they are helpless. They then added that in any case if they arrested anyone, a single phone call from headquarters was all that would be required to release the person. 

“Everybody knows somebody up high at headquarters so there is no point arresting a person only to have them released the next minute”. But can’t you at least caution them? They looked at me sadly as if to say, “You just can’t understand.” 

What the policemen did not realise was that I observed them from another vantage point from where I saw them stopping heavy trucks carting goods which had not run any red.

I am almost tempted to scream that corruption is us! Leave President Mahama alone, but of course, the buck stops with him and fighting corruption high and low, this must be the first order of his business. 

gapenteng@outlook.com