The Origin of Corruption

Coming from the Latin, com rumpere, with com, meaning “with, together,” and “rumpere,” meaning “to break,” engaging in corruption can break or destroy someone’s trustworthiness and good reputation with others.

The full meaning of corruption includes dishonest or illegal behaviour especially by powerful people, such as government officials or police officers. And the inducement to do wrong by improper or unlawful means.

Corruption does not only mean, bribery, under-invoicing and over-invoicing, adding or subtracting zeros to or from monetary figures to favour oneself.

Corruption is always the result of corrupt minds. If elections was required to get officers into political office, and one party organises its forces, to go and threaten voters away from the polling stations, to invade polling stations and constituency centers during collation of results and use coercion or threat to make sure that the results favour them, by all means, these are acts of corruption.

When someone in authority, uses his or her position to make males or females beneath them to go against their will, by engaging in immoral activities, this is corruption.

Here, we can use an example of what is well-known as sex-for-grade. There are many very brilliant women who could make great contributions to national growth, but they were unfortunately dismissed from school for poor grades simply because, they chose their dignity and refused to sleep with a teacher or lecturer and were unrightfully failed in all subjects. At the same time there are many women in top positions who do not deserve to get there, but only because they offered their dignity to teachers and lecturers for grades.

This is what can be classed as breeding corruption. For as more and more of these students joined the system through these immoral acts, they would always engage in the corrupted acts of always using what they have to get what they want.

It is also corruption when the institution finds out that its lecturer engages in sex with students before passing them, but instead of dismissing him, he only got suspended.

And it is corruption when such lowly level fellow is offered a high office of state. The question is not what will happen to ladies in his office but when will this start happening to them.

The other day, during the funeral of an important person in my life, a friend made a donation of GH¢2,000.00 to me and it was graciously announced by the MC. A few months later,I got duplicates of the receipts. By the name of my generous friend was the figure GH¢20.00.

I shook my head and laughed. In the presence of my friend, GH¢2,000.00 was written on the original copy and GH¢2000 on the duplicate. The MC was given the duplicate and she announced GH¢2,000.00, alright. After she returned it to those at the table, a dot was inserted between the zero after the figure 2, to read GH¢20.00. Then a whooping GH¢1,980.00 was pocketed. Well done, corruption.

Any conduct against moral ethic is corruption. That was why H.E. John Agyekum Kufuor rightly said, corruption existed from Adam. If the serpent had not corrupted the mind of Eve and Eve had not corrupted the mind of Adam, no one would have eaten the forbidden fruit and we shall not be in a sinful like this. Morality and good conduct would have been the pillar of life.

Corruption is a sin and the state must find ways of making it simply unattractive. This will mean, laws, if already made must be fully implemented without fear or favour. No one should be spared and the higher the person the more severe the punishment.

During the previous administration, we had a situation where owners and directors of a bank, violated banking laws and used the bank’s capital to award loans for themselves. This was a crime which should have had all those involved serving sabbatical in jail. However, instead of jailing the owners and directors and keeping the staff at post after the Central Bank recapitalises the bank, it was rather closed down and all the innocent staff were dismissed, while the owners were untouched expect only one director who rightfully got jailed.

Living conditions and standards of everyone must be well upgraded. Wages and salaries must not be “take me home,” but after settling all monthly expenditures, at least a quarter of the wages and salaries can be deposited into savings and bonds accounts, which would make the economy grow strong.

Good remunerations can deter people from being corrupt. Let us look at this scenario: One Friday, a very honest and principled accountant in a company, received GH¢20,000.00 as payment of a loan owed to the company. He got home that evening, only to find his wife dying and had to rush her to the hospital. He was asked to make a deposit of GH¢20,000.00 before treatment could commence. All he had on him was GH¢500.00 but payday was a fortnight away and he is paid less than GH¢3,000.00, monthly.

With no where to go to get this money, he was in a dilemma. He had the safe keys on him. Should he go back to work and unlawfully take the money to save his wife from dying or should he adhere to his principled and uncorrupted ways and watch his wife, the mother of his children, die?

Hon. Daniel Dugan

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect The Chronicle’s stance.

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