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No society, developed or developing, is immune to corruption. However, it seems that developed countries recognize the threat of different forms of conspicuous corruption to their societies and they deal with it accordingly. That does not only punish the culprits of such behavior, it also restores the public trust to government institutions. In the case of the developing societies like ours, the things are totally different. The attitude of the leaders is grab what ever you can and fast. Recently, former Illinois Governor Blagojevich, was impeached for allegedly trying to sell the senate seat of president Obama. In the mean time, in Djibouti city some members of ARS-J, were allegedly taking lots of cash from prospective members of parliament, and most probably nothing will happen to those who are allegedly responsible this terrible unlawful activity. These allegations are not one incident at one time, and ARS-J members are not the only people doing it, they are more like a tradition for whenever new MPs are recruited. Corruption, especially in the leadership level, is devastating to the economy and it destroys the entrepreneurship spirit of the society. It kills the motivation of the individuals to work hard and earn. There is no way that a corrupted person or group will ever put the interest of people ahead of theirs. If the leaders are engaged blatant corruption, what will you expect the rest of society to do? They either ignore it and pretend it is not happening or more likely some groups, like the military or militias, will use fighting corruption as a justification to gain power by the force. Either way, the results are disastrous as we have witnessed not long ago. Media plays an important role fighting corruption and one should promote freedom of expression to effectively use for this purpose. It can trigger formal investigations once media reports allegations of any kind of fraudulent activities. It can also act as shaming venue for those who are convicted of these kinds of actions. But there have to be laws that protect innocent people being slandered by irresponsible media. It is not easy to defeat this disease that had first infested large number of our influential politicians and now spread to the rest of the society. But the cost of doing nothing is unbelievable. Any one, who wants to change this, must act immediately and with strong determination. In this extreme situation you will need drastic measures to prevail over this malignant ‘C’. Abdulkadir M. Abow _______________________________________________________________________________ We welcome the submission of all articles for possible publication on WardheerNews.com So please email your article today Opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of WardheerNews |
