Hello, welcome back to our course on Corruption. This is Week 4, Lecture 4. And today we'll talk about control of corruption by polities. Really what we're asking is, can corruption be controlled? Now I, because of my research, travel all over the place working on these particular issues. This is the single most frequent question that other people want to answer for me. Virtually everybody says, corruption, it can't be controlled. There's no way of controlling corruption. It's been here forever, it'll be here forever. These people are not taking a very historical look at the phenomenon of corruption. Let me tell you about a couple of places not that long ago as far as the world goes. Singapore, 1940s, 1950s, largely considered one of the most corrupt places on planet Earth. Virtually everything was for sale in Singapore with the not just knowledge of, but tacit encouragement of, various government officials. We have an echo of that era today in a drink sometimes called the Singapore Sling, right. We also can look at some of the literature from people who were traveling at the time and Singapore was a place of hedonism. Singapore Boogie Avenue, for example, was a place to go for entertainment that one could find virtually nowhere else in the world. Singapore was an entrepot for the slave trade. This is the 1950s, a time when slavery had been eradicated in most of the world. Another place, Hong Kong. Hong Kong was a British Colony [COUGH] administered by the Brits. But the subculture of Hong Kong, in fact, again with the non-official but very, very involved encouragement of the government was a place of equal amounts of corruption, a very corrupt place. Virtually anything could be acquired in Hong Kong. And government officials rarely acted without some form of bribery. Buildings would burn down because the owner of the building wasn't able to pay a bribe in time to the firefighters who would stand there watching it burn. We've seen this diagram, this graph, which comes from Transparency International, the Corruption Perceptions Index. And when we saw it we looked at those polities that were at the very top of the graph, and that's where we find Singapore and Hong Kong. Singapore in particular is considered one of the cleanest, most honest, most effective governments in the entire world. So what happened? Well, Singapore's interesting. Singapore, as you probably know, was a Crown colony. After the end of World War II, the Malay Peninsula, the islands, Singapore, all decided that it was time for them to leave the control of the United Kingdom and form their own polities. Initially, Malaysia and Singapore were one federated polity. It was clear, however, that that wasn't really going to work, and so Singapore embarked on a trajectory of independence. Singapore knew it would be independent. As it built toward independence, it decided that there would be elections. And there were two parties who were the largest parties contending for control, the democratic party and the LDP. The LDP was led by Lee Kuan Yew. And Lee Kuan Yew is one of those people in history who is clearly a brilliant administrator, a far-seeing administrator. And Lee Kuan Yew sat down with his top leaders and said Singapore's future is in trade. Singapore's future is in services, because Singapore is located in southeast Asia at the crossroads of a number of trade routes. Lee Kuan Yew said, no one will entrust their goods to us if we're corrupt. So we need to handle corruption. We need to eradicate corruption In our newly formed country of Singapore, looked his leaders in his eyes, and he said, I cannot be corrupt. And if I ever am corrupt, your job is to get rid of me. And I want you to go to the people that you work with and tell them exactly the same thing. And I want you to tell them to go to the people that they work with and tell them exactly the same thing. What's interesting about this is that Lee Kuan Yew inherently instinctively understood that one way of controlling corruption is changing the way that people think. He embedded in Singaporean bureaucrats an extreme distaste for engaging in corrupt acts, and that embeddedness exist to this day. But they didn't ignore structure either. Now the LDP won. The LDP won, ironically, because the democratic party accepted a large number of bribes from the United States. And when that was made public, the people of Singapore would not vote for the democratic party. LDP was swept to victory. And after their victory, they created the Corrupt Practices Investigation Bureau, an agency independently tasked with the investigation and referral for prosecution of corrupt acts. And the CPIB was and is very active. It monitors, it audits, it investigates, and on those rare occasions in which corruption is found to have existed in Singapore, it refers for prosecution. The CPIB is widely respected around the world. It is a template for an independent agency that investigates and controls corruption, but it’s important to remember that this is in a polity in which norms have been deeply embedded and it’s also in a polity that’s small and relatively nimble. What happened in Hong Kong is different but equally instructive. Hong Kong, you'll recall, was at that time a colony of the United Kingdom, and it was governed by a governor appointed by the United Kingdom who then appointed bureaucrats and political leaders to run the state mechanisms of the polity of Hong Kong. One of those bureaucrats, the chief of police, was a man named Peter Godber, Peter Godber, while the chief of police of the colony of Hong Kong, amassed a fortune in bribes. You will recall that at this point in time, Hong Kong was an endemic corrupt polity. He took his bribe earnings and went back to London. When this was revealed, the people of Hong Kong finally had enough. They finally said loudly, this can no longer go on. In fact, they expressed their anger and discontent to such a degree that the United Kingdom became concerned that they would no longer be able to control this colony. And so, the colony of Hong Kong embarked on a program to control corruption. They approached it slightly differently than Lee Kuan Yew because they were in a different position. Rather than starting out without engaging corruption, they needed to control corruption that already existed. So they enacted a set of the laws and created a set of guidelines for the behavior of government officials. But they also said, we're going to give you a year. During this year, from the time we enact these laws to the time these laws take effect, you're going to get in trouble if you start new corrupt relationships. But with respect to your existing corrupt relationships, you have a year to wind those down. It sounds odd, but it actually made a lot of sense. If they had criminalized his existing relationships at the outset, there would have been a great incentive for people not to terminate those relationships because it's difficult to wind down a relationship, but instead to hide those relationships. On the other hand, with amnesty, they could openly wind down those relationships, and for the most part they did. Hong Kong is now one of the cleanest polities in the entire world. But Hong Kong didn't rely just on making it easy and minimizing the costs of unwinding these relationships. Hong Kong also created structures. They created their own independent agency, the Independent Commission Against Corruption, which is also widely regarded around the world, and is often used as a model for an agency that deals with corruption. And as with the Singaporean agency, the Hong Kong agency has the power to investigate, has the power to audit, has the power to refer for prosecution. It also has an educational component. It is tasked with going not just to government offices and government agencies, but also going to schools, going to community organizations throughout Hong Kong to teach people about corruption. In fact, if you want very specific, very targeted videos on issues of corruption, not an overview like this, but something aimed at something specifically within Hong Kong and a very tiny bit of corruption, ICAT's video library is probably one of the best in the world. John Qua is the leading scholar in research on the effectiveness of independent agencies and of corruption control programs by polities in general. And Qua has found that there's a few things in common with successful control of corruption by polities. One is that there's actually national will behind this, that the public and the leadership want to control corruption. And that is not something that exists everywhere. People hate corruption everywhere, they despise corruption everywhere. But not every polity has quite gotten to the point where there is will to actually take this issue on. Now that will can be enhanced through education. But it's something that needs to develop before a successful program for dealing with corruption can be initiated. Qua also finds that it requires a well structured bureaucracy. And one of the things that Lee Kuan Yew did and one of the things that Singapore's famous for was creating respect for bureaucrats, not because they have power and can exercise that power over you, but because they're helping the country. They're moving Singapore forward. In addition, Singapore and bureaucrats have a good living wage, a wage that also says we respect what you do. Qua found that there should be a body that investigates and prosecutes or refers for prosecution. In some countries like the United States, like Canada, those bodies do other things as well, but they have the power to investigate and prosecute corruption and they do so. Qua found that on-going education is important, again, that enhances the national will. It creates an understanding of the costs associated with corruption. It creates an incentive for people to push their leaders, push their bureaucrats, push their representatives to deal with issues of corruption. And finally, a steady flow of information. And this can be articulated in in all kinds of ways depending on how polities are structured. Some people talk about it as a freedom, freedom of the press, freedom of information. Some people talk about it as access, accessed information, online information. Some people talk about as simply a relationship or accountability between government and those who are governed. In any case, however it's structured, whatever one wants to call it, a steady flow of information is a critical aspect of controlling corruption. But Qua's research and the examples of Singapore, of Hong Kong, of a number of countries around the world, there are more polities. Answer this question. Can corruption be controlled? Yes, yes, it can. Thank you very much. And I truly have enjoyed our lectures together.
