Govt alone can't fight corruption
Civil society organisations of a country need to be mobilised to speak up for better governance as the government alone cannot fight corruption, said Prof Dr Peter Eigen, founder of Transparency International, a Berlin-based civil society group campaigning globally against corruption.
"We feel that very often, even if the top of a country -- a president or prime minister -- is extremely strong and committed to fight corruption, they cannot do it alone. They need civil society, media and faith-based organisations to change the culture [of corruption]," he said in an exclusive interview with The Daily Star yesterday.
Eigen, the chair of TI's advisory council, came to Dhaka to attend a conference held yesterday.
During the interview, Eigen said TI has developed a holistic approach conveying the message that a society is a little bit like the human body that has immune system for protecting it against diseases.
"There are many different institutions, values and laws like procurement law, conflict of interest law, information legislation, freedom of the media and so on. If all these elements of a society are in order like the human body which has good immune system then they will not get sick.”
But if some of these elements are not in order, very often the good elements do not help, said Eigen, also the founding chairman of Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative.
For instance, he said, if a country had a good procurement law but did not have an independent media, where one could go to complain about its violation, the law would not help.
Similarly, if the judicial system is corrupt in a country, good procurement system does not help, said the TI founder. He founded TI in 1993 with the mission to promote better governance and fight corruption worldwide.
Eigen initiated Garment Industries Transparency Initiative (GITI) last year. GITI is a multi-stakeholder initiative aimed at promoting transparency as a means to improve labour condition in the global garment supply chain.
During his stay until November 24 in the country, he will hold exploratory meetings on GITI with different stakeholders facilitated by Transparency International Bangladesh.
About the transparency in complying with ILO (International Labour Organisation) standards in the garment sector, especially after last year's Rana Plaza tragedy, he said civil society, private sector and the government should work together to address the problems facing the garment industry in Bangladesh.
"They have to be independent of each other because they have different interests. But they should cooperate in order to do a joint diagnosis of the problem and to develop joint recipes," he added.
After the tragedy that killed over 1,000 people, garment buyers from Germany are under tremendous criticism. Customers there do not buy their products anymore saying that those come from Bangladesh and so the German buyers are going somewhere where garment makers are complying with the ILO labour standards.
Therefore, factory owners, workers, government, media should try to create a system that would ensure the availability of credible information about various aspects of the garment sector. And that's what GITI is trying to do in Bangladesh with the assistance of multi-stakeholder working groups, Eigen said.
Asked about the government's criticism over the Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI) prepared by TI, the chair of TI advisory council said it was like shooting the messenger rather than addressing the problem of corruption.
"Our corruption perception index is a result of mathematics. Last time we have evaluated 14 different opinion surveys and asked tens of thousands of people how they judge Bangladesh on the scale of 1 to 10.
"This is a global opinion survey," he said, adding that each year TI published the corruption perception index citing the sources.
Sharing a story involving former prime minister of Malaysia Mahathir Mohamad, Eigen said that when Mahathir saw his country's position on the index he said western people did not understand Asian values and tried to look down upon Asia.
Three Malaysian experts then went to TI's office in Berlin following his invitation. Returning to Malaysia, they said TI had maintained its highest professionalism with regard to statistics and econometrics. Hearing this, Mahathir apologised to TI in parliament.
TI is likely to launch its next CPI in the first week of December, Eigen said.
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