Beating the Corruption Enterprise

Perpetrators of criminal acts routinely defeat the machinery of justice, enabled by their understanding of the limited capacity of state agents, borders and institutions to prevent crime. The traditional view is that an offender must have criminal intent even if he is ultimately influenced by forces in his environment but external to his control. Yet certain criminal behaviour, even if entirely involuntary, usually lacks the essential features that will adjudge it criminal in the eyes of the law.

There are, particularly in property and economic crime, a host of factors that drive the volition of offenders-to-be—factors that, identified, could enable the state to defeat crime. It is sufficient to state that there is no ‘be all and end all’ panacea to corrupt practices. Corruption will outlive all of us and enter the next generation for certain. However, the reason corruption escalates to endemic proportions is no different from any other crime or proscribed conduct. This reason being the failure of combatants to understand the ecosystem within which the crime operates. As objectionable as corrupt practices are, the drive to curb and eliminate them necessarily requires the same strategic, deliberate and critical thinking employed by their perpetrators. ‘Intelligent guess work’ by the state has proven to be no revolutionary or effective solution to corrupt practices.

To understand the ecosystem of crime, one must be aware of the nature of human behaviour, the forces at play that influence this behaviour in various forms, and the levers available to control and contain a departure from what is considered to be good order. As in most natural habitats, a diverse range of creatures, large and small, coexist in the ecosystem; therefore, as in the jungle, it is impossible to list or treat all the features of ‘the criminal enterprise’ or to treat it like a homogeneous whole. Nevertheless, certain salient features are worth examining critically, and could be instructive in developing a national plan of action against corruption.