Once corruption had begun, it metastasized through the society’s economic, social, and cultural systems in a variety of ways. The income that public officials obtained from rent seeking was not only built into their expectations as consumers, it was also built into their need for investible capital. The term that best suggests the full economic ramifications of corruption in Tanzania is primitive accumulation. Before long, the public officials who engaged in corruption did not treat their gains from this practice merely as supplemental income; they came to reckon it as an indispensable source of capital for the acquisition of land and other productive assets.
The opportunity for corrupt gains became a powerful motivation to pursue a public sector career. One source of this difficulty was that the heightened visibility of elite affluence during the era of reform gave rise to a completely new set of expectations about the lifestyle to which public officials could feel entitled. In Tanzania, extended family pressures added even further to the challenge of reducing corruption, as those fortunate enough to have lucrative public sector employment were expected to provide for relatives who did not. The result is that even as scarcities and prices eased during the period of reform, and even as public sector salaries have improved, Tanzania’s endemic problem of corruption has remained unabated. To the extent that is so, corruption is now functionally independent of the circumstances that first gave it rise.
Transparency International has taken the position that Tanzania’s highly centralized and extensively regulated economy was a major source of corruption.
Centralisation of the economy through nationalisation meant that the few powerful elites had a monopoly on the allocation of resources; in this situation, corruption was inevitable. Second, bureaucratic causes, such as red tape and rigid rules and regulations imposed by central and local government, contribute to increased corruption. Public officials were tempted to subvert these rules or were pressured into subverting them for individual or group gain, despite the fact that such acts were illegal. For example, one could not acquire a plot to build in Dar es Salaam unless one oiled the hands of bureaucrats.12
This was true as the initial source of the problem. Corruption, however, has persisted and even increased as Tanzania’s economy has become more open. If anything, the capital requirements for participating in the country’s expanding private economy have given many officials a greater incentive to engage in rent seeking.
Corruption thrived because it generated its own enabling environment. Ghanaian novelist Ayi Kwei Armah in The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born described a perverse cultural universe in which government officials engaging in corruption became contemptuous of those who were not.13 Armah’s book describes a shame culture in which the few remaining honest officials became the objects of peer group derision and social pressure, often from their own families, to conform to the corrupt system. The force of this culture operated as a powerful motivation to accept the norm of corrupt behavior. The culture of corruption in Tanzania closely resembles that described by Armah. Even in the most prestigious organs of government, such as the court system, there are subtle social pressures to engage in corruption and, thereby, become a part of its normative environment. Jennifer Widner has described this phenomenon in the Tanzanian judicial system in her compelling biography of Chief Justice Francis Nyalali.
Social pressures meant that judges and magistrates who declined to take bribes were at once esteemed for the model they set, and chastised, for their inability to do better by themselves and their communities…. Observed Tanzanian judge William Maina, who had experienced the problem himself, “Magistrates were blamed if they did not engage in corruption. People would say, ‘He is a foolish person because he has not used his position.’”14
Tanzanian lawyer and legal scholar Dr. Edward Hoseah, also director-general of the PCCB in Tanzania, has written an important book on the extent and impact of corruption in his country.15 His research, which he bases partly on his role as a leading anti-corruption combatant, provides a compelling account of the effects of this problem. Hoseah observes that villagers in remote areas expect public officials from their village to return with gifts. When they do so, they are welcomed as heroes; when they fail to do so, they have shamed the village community.16
For the average citizen, the list of transactions with persons in authority is inexhaustible. Individuals seeking to obtain a driver’s license, receive medical treatment at a government hospital, enroll their children in school, report a minor crime at a police station, or mail a package at a post office—all encounter officials who expect an added financial inducement. One of the most common forms of corruption in Tanzania is the extortion of bribes by police for imagined offenses. According to a 2006 Commonwealth Human Rights Report, the Tanzanian police routinely arrest or detain people to extort bribes.17
Corruption in Tanzania has become so commonplace that it has generated its own vocabulary. The expression lete chai (literally, “bring me a cup of tea”), means “may I have a bribe?” and generally elicits the favorable response, nitakupa chai (“I will give you tea”). Encounters with the police also have their own phraseology: the common expression kuingia bure, kutoka kwa pesa means that there is no cost to go into a police station, but it will require a bribe to leave. The term takrima, which means “gift,” has two separate meanings, both associated with corruption. The first is the consideration public officials expect to receive in return for their services; the second has to do with electoral corruption, the small payments the CCM gives to people who attend its rallies and vote for its candidates. Corruption in the CCM is a topic of almost daily conversation among Tanzanians who distinguish within the CCM between mafisadi (corrupt ones) and political leaders who are safi (clean). Most politicians are in the former category; few are in the latter. Average Tanzanians generally feel powerless to do anything about these problems.
The major government study of corruption in Tanzania, published in 1996 and known as the Warioba Commission report because former prime minister Joseph Warioba wrote it, describes the all-pervasiveness of Tanzania’s corruption problem.
There is no doubt that corruption is rampant in all sectors of the economy, public services and politics in the country. There is evidence that even some officers of Government organs vested with the responsibility of administration of justice namely the Department of National Security, the Police, the Judiciary and the Anti-Corruption Bureau are themselves immersed in corruption: Instead of these organs being in the forefront of combating corruption, they have become part of the problem. Consequently, the ordinary citizen who is looking for justice has no one to turn to. He is left helpless and has lost faith in the existing leadership.18
No small part of Tanzania’s difficulty in dealing with corruption lies in the fact that the government agencies created to deal with the problem have become susceptible to the same set of difficulties, including inadequate wages, as other portions of the government bureaucracy.
The Warioba Commission’s inventory of corrupt practices has two broad categories. The first is petty corruption. This form of corruption is everywhere in Tanzania, and the report lists numerous examples. Teachers demanded bribes from parents to enroll their children in school. Hospital personnel, including doctors, demanded bribes for treating patients. Police officers arrested innocent people to demand bribes for their release. Finance Department personnel demanded bribes from fellow workers to release their payments. Judicial personnel demanded bribes from litigants to process their paperwork. There was no transaction with a government official, however small, that did not require a side payment.
The second form of corruption described in the Warioba Report is grand corruption, when high-ranking officials find ways to leverage their government positions for vast sums. This can occur when the government signs fraudulent contracts with suppliers, when it issues business licenses at a tiny fraction of their net worth, or when customs officials underestimate the value of imports to lower duties or charge special fees for the timely clearing of shipping containers. Once embedded in the system, corruption becomes entrenched.