Corruption: Drivers, Modes and Consequences

*Douglas Matorera*

## **Abstract**

Corruption has become ubiquitous in both the private and public sectors of rich and poor countries across the globe. It occurs in various modes and always causes human suffering, particularly on the most innocent poor and vulnerable, the same humans who have neither the means nor resources to resist or escape. The chapter investigates corruption, where and how it happens, its drivers, causes, and strategies used to conceal it when and where it happens. It looks at the growing movement of anti-corruption activism and the factors key to the success of this movement. The factors steering the anti-corruption drive are knowledge, confidence, solutions and intolerance to corruption. Literature makes some distinction between petty and grand corruption. While corruption is seen as either petite or grand, there are two factors that make corruption indistinguishably concerning: systematisation and the multiplier effect. What may look like petty corruption will in the long run have huge repercussions on more than the two or so who started the corrupt act. Petite or grand, corruption kills, its devastating impact on the social, economic, financial, developmental and political lives of communities is gusty and puffy. Technology is making a footprint in the fight against corruption as much as it is worsening the scourge of corruption on humankind.

**Keywords:** corruptor, anti-corruption activism, wilful blindness, corruption multiplier effect, concealment of corruption, cognitive dissonance, psychological entitlement

## **1. Introduction**

Corruption has become an item and an agenda of great concern for its undesirability in both the public and private lives of persons and institutions. Defining this evil is difficult because of its dependence on a number of factors that are never the same over time and geographically. There are no limits to what corruption can involve: services, humans, money, physical objects, (mis)representations, sex and even deaths. Corruption can involve embezzlement, influence peddling, collusion, commissions and fees, insider trading, bribery and kickbacks, extortion and solicitation, and sexual favours. Humans are generally aware of corrupt deeds and engage in them out of cognitive dissonance. When systemic corruption habituates corruption, the state of psychological entitlement to a bribe engulfs the perpetrators and calcifies in them somehow like in the 'boiling the frog phenomenon'. The key driver of corruption

is greed but the extreme destitute seems to be winning lenience. Weak governance systems, disorderly and punitive economic situations and cultural habits are creating grounds that variably 'encourage' corruption. Corrupt people will try to conceal their misdeeds through physically concealing the proceeds from corruption, misrepresentation, using intermediaries such as agents, agencies, joint ventures, falsifying documents and transacting through cryptocurrencies. It is, therefore, always important to check the moral probity of the ones your business is engaging with. Attempts to evade punishment have always been assessed and weighed against the constructs of innocent blindness, ignorancia affectada or wilful blindness. Petty corruption may have a different definition from grand corruption, but the multiplier effect makes petite corruption as devastating as grand corruption. The multiplier effect in this sense has four implications: Once one tests the benefits of a corrupt action, they are likely to do it again, thus multiplying the deed. Corruption starts with small benefits and progressively seeks high-rewarding misdeeds, thus multiplying the magnitude of the ill-benefit. Corruption is contagious, and bystanders see and want to be involved, thus multiplying the number of corrupt persons. A corrupt deed may start with money between two persons but escalates through other things aside from money and the suffering of many thousands of people in time and over geographical space, thus multiplying the suffering. Effectively corruption kills. Systemic corruption destroys individuals, organisations and countries systemically and systematically. However, increased corruption literacy and confidence in the workability of proven solutions have calcified anti-corruption activism. Corruption should not be tolerable anymore, and someone should be encouraged to stop the corruption-but at them, here now and forever. With more resolve with the anti-corruption activism, societies should be able to stop erosion of human dignity by reversing corruption in education, mining, oil and gas industry, wildlife trade, waste disposal, etc.
