Editorial Comment: Battle against corruption needs facts, not sensational rumours

Corruption can eat into the heart of any society, destroying the integrity and honesty we all rely on when we interact with each other and replacing the rules of law and regulation with the rule of dishonest men and women making arbitrary decisions for money.

The vice needs to be fought, and fought successfully, so that we can progress and accelerate our development with permanent gains, and everybody understanding that there are no short cuts, that success means hard work not cheating, and that crime is punished in courts, not condoned by payment of bribes.

The Second Republic has made this battle a core policy for more than six years, and has been scoring a large number of successes. 

Several people have been jailed, fired and suspended and systems revamped so that it becomes very difficult to move off the straight and narrow and even when the almost limitless innovation of the criminal classes is employed. Corruption can be caught, stopped and reversed.

The upshot has been that, while not yet totally eliminated, corruption is now far less common in the central Government arena and efforts are being stepped up to bring it right down in the local government arena, although even here the successful hunting down of the corrupt has seen jail terms and many on suspension while investigations creep on.

A fair amount of media coverage has been accurately charting the progress, reporting on arrests, courts cases, jail terms and the civil cases where those who acquired property with tainted money lose those assets, another measure to make sure everyone understand crime does not pay.

But there is in some areas for the media and in general conversation a tendency to sensationalising the fight against corruption, and for that matter sensationalising corruption itself. We hear and sometimes read comments that “everyone” in Government is on the take and that corruption is very widespread.

When you seek details, you get nothing except that this is universal knowledge. 

Many making sweeping statements cannot give even an example of something that happened to them or something that they saw.

Minister of Information, Publicity and Broadcasting Services Dr Jenfan Muswere at the end of last week brought up this problem of sensationalising corruption and related topics and noted that it undermined the battle against corruption.

He noted that corruption involves three, not two, participants. There is the person initiating the corrupt activity and the person who benefits, the traditional pair in any corrupt transaction. 

But there is also a third, the person who knows, closes their eyes and does nothing, thus condoning the criminal activity.

But often people turn a blind eye not because they are necessarily dishonest themselves, but because they have come to believe that there is nothing they can do, that corruption is so universal that the odds of action being taken are minimal, and that in any case the perpetrators will escape, if only because they have important relatives and protectors.

This is the damage that sensationalising the crime does, makes people believe that corruption cannot be beaten and that it is useless to try, rather than seeing the truth and we have pushed this back significantly over six years or strong and unrelenting effort with President Mnangagwa himself making it explicitly clear that corruption cannot be tolerated and that no one is going to be protected.

At the same time, he has been extremely positive about those who have succeeded in some endeavour through making the best of their opportunities and putting in the necessary hard work.

That positive pressure helps to eliminate corruption, by highlighting the many cases where people have that satisfaction of doing something well without short cuts or crime and highlighting that the non-corrupt will rise the highest.

There is a clear difference when you look back on what you have achieved between the warm pleasure of having done it properly and the emptiness of having done it through bribes, contacts or twisting the systems. And the President has been leading this culture change.

Minister Muswere was hardly wanting the media to stop reporting on corruption. 

After all he was speaking at an awards ceremony for journalists who had done well in exposing corruption and reporting generally on both the problem and the successes and perhaps the failures. But these reporters and writers were working with facts, not social media theories and gossip in the back of bars.

And it is this sort of journalism that he wants to encourage, built on facts with the right inferences drawn and logical analysis. 

This will support the battle against corruption with sensational “everyone knows” nonsense will damage the battle and could well hamper investigations, and at the very least divert investigations from the real criminals.

And as we have noted, it can make some just give up, become corrupt themselves or at least turn a blind eye. 

We must not minimise the cancer of corruption, but we must also recognise that we are all called upon to play our part, not just in avoiding corrupt activities but also in not turning a blind eye to corruption and instead passing on the sort of information that the anti-corruption forces need to investigate and prosecute.

Tip-offs by the honest are becoming more common as people recognise that the battle can be won, and is being won and as more people step forward the investigators can get the leads they need and build up their digging into the underworld that we all want to see eliminated.