Corruption, Politics, and Societal Values in Tanzania

Although corruption is found in all societies, arguably, its impact is most severe in developing countries where political institutions have weak foundations and resources are scarce.This article examines corruption in Tanzania, an impoverished East African country that has been among the top finishers in Transparency International's annual rankings of the most corrupt countries in the world.Despite widespread attempts by the Mkapa administration to fight it, citizens remain bombarded with images of high-level corruption in the press and in their face-to-face dealings with public officials.Williams (1999, 503) notes that most definitions of corruption tend to be "vague, elusive, and unsatisfactory."One of the problems in defining corruption is that it is closely related to societal moral and legal standards.These standards are seldom universal.In this article, we argue that corruption cannot be understood outside existing power relations in a given society.This is particularly true because corruption is socially defined.This article argues that the best way to conceptualize corruption is as a process in socioeconomic and political development that is more than a problem of individual morality or market imperfections.Understanding corruption requires a focus on morals, values, and ethics.In this respect, the struggle to curb corruption requires a change in societal values and not only a change in the behavior of public administrators, as many contemporary models emphasize.Because societal power relations are embodied in the corruption process, changing societal behavior requires the commitment of not only the top leadership but also all major actors in the society.In order to highlight the socially constructed nature of corruption and the politics surrounding efforts to control it, we propose a two-level model that is discerned from the Tanzanian experience.The model is a modified version of the generally accepted categories of grand and petty corruption. 1 Although "grand" and "petty" are useful descriptive categories, their main problem is that they are of little analytical value."Grand" and "petty" specify scale without capturing the reality of corruption as a political, economic, and social process.In most cases this categorization leads to legalistic solutions that are unlikely to contain the widespread abuse of office.In order to better understand corruption, we modify the descriptive categories of "grand" and "petty" to take into account people's perceptions of the different types of corruption.For the majority of Tanzanians, what is referred to as "grand corruption" could more accurately be termed "abstract