Transparency International has just published its Global Corruption Barometer report and its Malta scorecard has three numbers to make us pause.
The Maltese residents who think government corruption is a major problem constitute 65% of the sample. Those who think the government is doing a good job in fighting corruption are 56%. Yet, those who fear reprisals if they report corruption constitute 56%, too.
These numbers are not contradictory. But they do require explanation and comparison with the rest of the EU-27.
Some context. The survey was conducted between October and November last year. In thinking of corruption as a major government problem, we are slightly above the average of 62% but that’s not the full story.
We’re in the same category as France, Hungary, Greece and Poland. Between 19-25 points separate us from the next three countries beneath us (Austria, Belgium and Estonia) and circa 50 points separate us from Finland and Denmark.
We are in the 10th best place in thinking that the government is doing a good job fighting against corruption. The EU average is 43%. But there’s more to read here: Slovakia, with over 80% who think corruption is a big problem, has 61% that think government is doing a good job fighting it.
Indeed, some countries with the biggest perceived problem of government corruption score better than some countries with a smaller problem. It’s easier to make progress against corruption if you need to clean up a bigger mess.
Countries whose people have little fear of reprisals for reporting corruption are those with the smallest corruption problem. At 56%, Malta is the eighth highest, and well above the average of 45%.
Seven countries fear reprisals more; they all have more perceived corruption. But there are eight countries whose people fear reprisals less than we do, even though they have a bigger corruption problem.
These sets of figures, combined with others in the survey, enable us to draw three conclusions.
One is good news for Robert Abela. The numbers of those who think he is doing a good job in tackling corruption – 56% – and those who think he’s doing a bad one, 39%, more or less tally with the gap between Labour and its opponents.
It’s another sign that the opposition can’t win the general election on an anti-corruption platform alone. It’s not because the majority of people are indifferent to corruption. Only Romania, in the EU-27, has a slight majority (53%) that accepts a little government corruption.
It has more to do with the information people have on corruption and how it’s tackled and people’s perception of whether the alternative would be better.
Second, there’s a lesson here for anti-corruption activists. Among them, it’s fashionable to believe that the Maltese are, in their majority, ‘amoral familists’. The numbers in the survey don’t support that (just as the theory of ‘amoral familism’ is itself largely misunderstood when applied to Malta). If anti-corruption activists want to persuade better, they’ll need a richer sociological imagination.
What we need to do to improve our anti-corruption system will undermine the way our politics and economy currently work- Ranier Fsadni
Third, the most important point is that the current numbers are no guarantee that things will get better. Other countries do better or worse than us because of the institutional system they have.
Alan Greenspan, the former chairman of the Federal Reserve, once put it this way: “Corruption, embezzlement, fraud, these are all characteristics which exist everywhere. It is regrettably the way human nature functions, whether we like it or not. What successful economies do is keep it to a minimum. No one has ever eliminated any of that stuff.”
When you look at what Transparency International recommends to combat corruption, nothing it says isn’t the shared wisdom of the authorities in the field. But that wisdom shows that what we need to do to improve our anti-corruption system will undermine the way our politics and economy currently work.
The conventional wisdom says that the main reasons for the institutionalisation of corruption are a culture of secrecy, lack of transparency, weak accountability of public servants and weak investigative bodies.
Abela says his government is strengthening the investigative bodies. Let’s accept that for the sake of argument. His government continues to be secretive: it resists freedom of information requests, makes a mockery of parliamentary questions and is proposing to weaken the de facto accountability of its army of persons of trust.
Transparency says that those reporting corruption are to be protected against ruinous lawsuits abroad (SLAPPs) and other forms of intimidation. Abela’s government has not taken steps to pass a law against SLAPPs, while Labour has several organised online groups that mobilise against journalists.
As for accountability for abuses of power? Or action against favouritism in service delivery and public contracting? The ombudsman and the auditor general report; the government ignores.
Transparency International has two recommendations that specifically affect Malta. It recommends that the commission goes through with infringement procedures against Malta and Cyprus over passport sales, saying the ‘investment schemes’ are a corruption honeypot.
For the same reason, it also recommends a crackdown on tax avoidance and its accompanying secrecy. This recommendation, too, is aimed at a systemic part of our economy – financial services.
Just because Transparency International recommends something doesn’t mean it will happen or even that it’s right. But it is a powerful, influential voice and its findings should be discussed seriously.
As things stand, even while the report shows why Abela is coasting towards a general election victory, it also shows he faces serious systemic problems – eventually of an economic nature – that he cannot address without changing the way he himself does politics.
