Conclusion: Corruption, Development and De-development

Abstract

The basic argument of this book has been that the phenomenon of political corruption — the illegal use of public office for private gain — can be understood only against a background of social and economic change. We have seen that in pre-modern societies some notion of the abuse of office certainly existed but since access to and behaviour within office were deeply embedded in the network of personal exchanges which underpinned the social order, a distinctive public sphere could not be clearly differentiated from private interests. Accusations of corruption, therefore, had about them a good deal of arbitrariness in the sense that they seldom conformed to legal criteria objectively applied. Generally speaking such accusations were closely bound up with and tended to reflect the interminable struggle between dominant factions for control over the state apparatus.

‘We’re being killed. Nothing has any meaning. That is why everyone is so frantic. Everyone wants to make his money and run away. But where? That is what is driving people mad. They feel they are losing the place they can run back to … It’s a nightmare. All these airfields the man has built, the foreign companies have built — nowhere is safe now.’

V. S. Naipaul, A Bend in the River