To fight against Extortion, Corruption and Economic Anarchy

In developing countries specially in Asia, where several vicious circles are much abound, if the subject matter is ignored and is kept derelict by responsible political groups, there’s much potentiality for the corruption to spread, and resultantly Bad Governance and ultimately leading to another way of turmoil and conflict.

Corruption is the strongest and foremost obstacle of Good Governance in poor countries. Accountability, Transparency and Social Inclusion, which are the essential pillars of Good governance, have become a severe challenge in several developing countries like Nepal.

Nepal, even after radical democratic changes couldn’t get rid of existing diseases like rampant corruptions, impunity, anarchy and bad governance, rather the state has plunged into these dreadful defects instead. Multi billions corruption scandals such as, gold smuggling, corruption in purchasing widebody jets, grabbing of precious state land are some of the cases, that major parties are widely believed to have been providing patronage.

Transparency International (TI), the most credible global civil society organization watching the speed and trend of corruption all over the world, ranked Nepal some 7 months before as the first most corrupt country among 17 other Asian countries.

The index, as TI highlights is based on expert assessment and data from six international surveys commissioned by six independent institutions, covering issues such as access to information, bribery of public officials, kickbacks in public procurement, and the enforcement of anti-corruption laws and their outcome, action against the corrupt, political corruption, and bribery in export and import of goods. Nepal couldn’t have improved the position particularly from 2012 so far. Nepal has been occupying higher position among the world’s corrupt nations.

Why Subsidy?

Although, there is some dispute over state subsidy, supporters of party subsidies argue that directly providing the campaign funds reduces Political corruption as parties do not need to raise money with an opinion/ strings attached, as extortion is becoming one the root cause of economic anarchy and bad governance.

‘Party subsidies can be relatively small (as in the U.K.) or quite generous (as in Sweden, Germany, Israel and Japan). Most likely public funding of political parties is neither a mere stop-gap nor an all-purpose solution to a variety of problems’. Various sources have shown that in many democracies public funding for political parties was introduced after scandals, which revealed political corruption or illegal funding, had become public knowledge.

In other countries, the rising costs of political competition stimulated the spread of party subsidies (government funding). Costa Rica and Uruguay in 1954 were the first to introduce such subsidies. They were followed by Puerto Rico (a U.S. territory in the Caribbean) in 1957 and (West)Germany in 1959. In Quebec (1963), a Canadian province, Sweden (1965), Finland (1967) and Israel (1969) parties received such support rather early.

Since the 1970s many countries have introduced party subsidies: Norway (1970), Canada and Italy (1974), Austria (1975), the U.S. (1976), Australia (1984), Denmark (1986), France (1988), Belgium (1989), Japan(1994), Ireland (1997), the Netherlands(1999), the U.K. (2000) and New Zealand (2010).

Nowadays among the established democracies only India and Switzerland stand out as exceptions to the rule. By now it is also used in Greece, Portugal, Spain and other more recently established democracies in Europe and Latin America (this paragraph is retrieved from Wikipedia).

The issue of subsidy and its impact upon politics may become an issue of considerable controversy. 110-countries Survey of Party Funding Laws conducted by International IDEA in 2002 shows a substantial number of countries in Asia do not have laws regulating party funding. Even in world’s largest democracies, the regulations are focused on individual candidates and not on political parties as critical actors in the democratic political system. There should be a common understanding that expenditures of political parties be regarded as expenses necessary to the normal functioning of the democratic political system, provided that such expenses are guided by standard regulatory measures.

Nepal has a bitter experience that those mainstream political parties which are not made recipients of State Subsidy, cannot in any way, be able to prevent Corruption, and in the state of being sans subsidy, bribery lurks to the fore in the form of Social Subsidy as domino effect.

Even the discussion held among the Executive Directors of World Bank in 13th December 1998, had concluded that Bad governance was the prime factor to obviate development in Nepal. Lack of good governance is confined not only to Nepal but has ramified globally as a common problem especially in developing countries. The result of this anomaly has been transformed to turmoil and conflict.

In 2003, Nepal had proposed to grant subsidy @Rupees 20/- per vote to nationally recognized parties, who had secured at least 3 % votes in the immediate Parliamentary election gone by. But, for one reason or another, that resolution was never materialized. Despite all these, Nepal has to do much for subsidy grant to the mainstream political parties, in order to alleviate political corruption.

In the wake of politically changed climate in Nepal during 1990, the first elected government of Nepali Congress, has gained several achievements in various spectrum, like Reformation of Financial sectors, Management of Public expenditures, Reform in Distribution process of Public works, Legal and institutional management of action against corruption, strengthening of Commission for Investigation on Abuse of Authority (CIAA), Monitoring of Infrastructure development, Transparency in Government performance and Right to Information etc.

Necessity

Democracy is not only meant a way of governance but it is also an attitude, process and culture. Democracy and Parties are inseparable and complementary to each other. ‘Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely’ as they say, that’s the main reason why one can find unlimited corruption in an Authoritarian regime. In order to stymie corruption, full fledged democratic atmosphere is essentially required, and the parties are the protagonists for this.

In the policy framework of the state, reflection of political corruption can easily be found. Only thwarting the impunity towards malpractice is not adequate enough to check the corruption and good governance. There’s a lurking fear that the squeezing effect could only ramify and transform to another facet.

Conclusion

The Peoples’ Movement 2006 was of course against impunity, corruption and bad governance as well as to remove the dictatorial Monarchy. In order to find a viable solution to prevent corruption and embolden the democratic institutions eradication of corruption, impunity and bad governance are compulsory duty for performance of all political parties. If the duty is obeyed by deeds, there won’t be any hindrance in establishing of good governance.

• Reasonable balance between public and private funding should be maintained.
• Fair criteria for the distribution of state contribution to parties are needed.
• Strict rules concerning private donation be made, so that, extortion case may not occur.
• There should be meaningful sanctions for the parties and candidates violating the rules.

In Nepal corruption is becoming pervasive since formal institutions and rules are becoming inactive and people’s activities are external to organizational mission. Therefore, corruption is not the cause of poor governance alone. It is therefore, necessary to measure the cause and extent of corruption and also assess the effectiveness of the institutions existed in the country.

This will certainly help in identifying different dimensions of corruption and offer opportunity to sharing views for the formulation of regulatory and institutional framework. One cannot expect moral or ethical values from the public in a condition of ignoring the political corruption. The preventive measures of the corruption should be ‘top down’, rather than ‘down up’.

Political will, commitment and determination are ‘sine qua non’ as a driving factor for the prevention of Political corruption. The state subsidy to the political parties on top would necessarily embolden the execution of these factors.