[ad_1]
Corruption in the UK is news again. Deputies from the Conservative Party have caught their hands in the box to fill bank accounts that abuse their positions. Prime Minister Boris Johnson has tried to cover up the regime: trying to use a majority in the lower house to pass laws that disregard the caregiver against the graft, who has reportedly received death threats.
Newspaper publishers call it a “sting” – a striking phrase for questionable and scandalous behavior – in the oil-rich realm where, since the COVID-19 pandemic began and despite major conflicts of interest, a third of lawmakers have pocketed nearly $ 7. m with private companies in lunar payments, including offers for contracts related to pandemic measures. He also accused the ruling party of selling seats in the upper house of parliament, the House of Lords, to donors for $ 4 million.
It is not the first time that the ethnically divided country in which the tribal separatist movements have suffered in the regions of Scotland and Northern Ireland has been overthrown by its politicians. According to a report released by the National Audit Office, more than 1 percent of $ 24 billion in COVID-19 contracts awarded to suppliers between March and July last year were awarded through a competitive process.
The process was surrounded by secrecy, with a local court ruling that the then health minister, Matt Hancock, had broken the law by failing to publish the details of the contracts within the required 30 days. In fact, the government set a “high priority path” that gave special treatment to suppliers recommended by ministers, government officials and lawmakers, which the shadow shadow cabinet minister would describe as a “buildable golden leap for friends and chancers”.
Corruption at the highest level of British power has not been preserved for the time of the pandemic. A decade ago, for example, MPs in the House of Commons and House of Lords were caught in a scheme that involved widespread abuse of claims and spending claims worth at least $ 2 million, many were forced to resign and others were sent. to prison.
The pursuit of illegal profits is also not a common practice of elite authority. The entire country has been identified as an international hub for tax fraud and money laundering, as well as a major destination for illegal financial flows around the world. It controls a “spider web” of territories and dependencies (where the British government has full power to impose or veto laws) and, according to the Tax Justice Network, “functions as a global network of tax havens, laundering and expelling money. City of London ”becoming the main promoter of theft and corruption.
However, it is interesting when discussing corruption in the kingdom, where, according to the humanitarian agency FareShare, one in eight people is struggling to get enough to eat, few ever describe it as a cultural problem in the same way that corruption is described. African.
“The African is rotten … They are all rotten. In fact, for many centuries the African has been the victim of the worst climate in the world for all the diseases imaginable. Almost his fault. But he has been hurt mentally and physically. We brought him Western education. But what good is it? ‘ says Mr. Green, a senior white official in Chinase Achebe’s novel No longer at Ease. While many may be reluctant to express this sentiment clearly in today’s #BlackLivesMatter days, a look at newspaper reports, both on the continent and abroad, would reveal that the inherent corruption of Africans is widespread.
Corruption and the postcolonial state: how the West invented Africa in the article on corruption, says racist scholar Gabriel Apata, despite the fact that corruption is universal, “As far as Africa is concerned, [corruption] it has been a lasting black mark that will not change, an idea that embraces the African situation in all its nuances and manifestations ”. Media descriptions often show how they present themselves as a pathology: “cancer, virus, epidemic, worm, etc., these descriptions bring images of diseases, Ebola and the origin of HIV-AIDS in Africa … Elsewhere. or any other continent is described in these terms as corruption. ‘
That is, despite the fact that African scholars have long located the roots of corruption in colonialism. As Kenyan writer Joe Khamisi says in his book Looters and Grabbers: 54 Years of Corruption and Plunder by the Elite 1963-2017, the role of colonialism in establishing corrupt practices has not stopped attempts to portray it as a legacy of the colony’s past. – As a result of a completely imagined “African tradition” to distribute gifts to “leaders”, ironically, they are another colonial invention.
Attempts to indigenize the graft follow a different and supposedly “African” reality, such as the “tribe”. Apata noted that the prototype of corruption “arose from the neoliberal capitalist tradition of the West and its exploitative tendencies, from a system that was exported and Africanized to Africa.”
In this sense, the corruption found especially in “Black Africa” is presented as something special and exotic, quite different from the enlightened practices of the “developed” West. So while both may have corrupt officials who abuse the power to rip off their citizens, corrupt European politics is presented as an aberration of society, a denial of its healthy values, and a corrupt African official is seen as a representation of African values.
This racist approach is also reflected in the different languages used to describe very similar practices. UK MPs are paid by companies to “lobby” for public contracts and then put on a “high priority path”. When the same thing happens in Kenya, lawmakers are said to have received “seroskeras” and the money is “channeled” into the pockets of corrupt private sector beneficiaries.
When civil servants steal money from Africans, their countries quickly gain the unfortunate distinction of being “corrupt” to themselves. However, when the same money is hidden, Pandora Papers has revealed that in Western tax havens, with the help of Western advisers, companies and organizations, these countries are not branded similarly.
“It has caused me the greatest problem, and it creates the biggest problem for me forever, to realize that things depend on what is called, no more than what they are,” wrote the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. This is certainly true of the Western worldview about corruption.
Attempts to essentialize and exoticize “African corruption” only serve to hide its true roots and sanitize Western behavior itself. And as Nietzsche noted, “in the beginning the appearance almost always becomes the essence in the end, and it functions as the essence”.
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.
[ad_2]
Source link
