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. Transparency International ranks Tanzania as one of the world’s most corrupt countries, but despite an outpouring of donor complaints, media attention, and citizen frustration, the problem remains unabated.19 The government’s anti-corruption efforts are widely perceived as pitiably ineffective. Tanzanians point out that their government has not successfully prosecuted a single case of corruption and that even parliamentary resolutions calling for specific actions against corrupt officials are routinely ignored.
A tacit conspiracy of impunity further enables corruption. Although some high-ranking officials have had to resign or been dismissed from their positions, and a few have even been brought to trial, practically no one has been convicted or required to restore funds to the government. Those who engage in corruption form an unspoken agreement that they will not inform on others who do so. This is what makes corruption so difficult to prosecute. In a culture of corruption, it becomes wholly permissible, almost obligatory, to condemn the generic phenomenon and, indeed, to cry out publicly for reforms that will address it. However, there is an understanding that those who do so will not name names or call for the legal prosecution of particular individuals. Because of all these factors, the problem of corruption has continued unabated during the current era of economic liberalization. Despite a vast and continuous outpouring of official studies and public pronouncements, as well as the formation of a series of government anti-corruption bureaus, and despite unremitting efforts to exhort public servants to cease this practice, the problem persists.20
Hoseah’s research shows that corruption in Tanzania has contributed to economic decline by imparting an element of unpredictability to the court system. Since there was no certainty that judges would uphold legal documents, prospective investors had every reason to feel insecure. Tanzanian courts have offered no certainty that business contracts would remain binding, that business partners would make payments as scheduled, or that contractors would deliver goods and services of agreed-upon quality. Judicial corruption has caused numerous investors to seek more secure alternate investment locations. Tanzania’s first economic shock was the failure of direct foreign investment. This is attributable to numerous causes, and even without corruption foreign firms might have found it more profitable to sell or lease their equipment to Tanzanian enterprises rather than invest directly. However, corruption in the court system has been such a significant deterrent to foreign investment that it has had a direct effect on the country’s economic performance.
The cause and effect connection between corruption and low growth is both multidimensional and all-pervasive. Corruption represents a transfer of scarce economic resources away from vitally important expenditures on schools, medical facilities, and infrastructure and toward conspicuous consumption on the part of the elite. Corruption also increased the operating costs of practically all forms of business enterprise. By draining funds that might otherwise have gone to improvement of public services, corruption has lowered government ability to improve the country’s energy, telecommunications, and transportation systems. The businesses that depend on these services operated less well or found opportunities to go elsewhere. Tanzanian businesses have also had to contend with the rent-seeking demands of bureaucratic officials seeking to increase their income. In an environment in which virtually every business activity involved some sort of transaction with a governmental agency, bribes increased the costs and the risks of everyday business activity.21 This has lowered economic performance by shifting investment priorities away from productive enterprises, such as factories and farms, which were proving to be vulnerable to official predation, toward economic activities that exposed less capital to political risk, such as small retail kiosks or other forms of petty trading.
Tanzanians with capital to invest withheld their efforts or devised ways to send their capital to other countries where they could invest more safely. Many emigrated for the same reason. It would be speculative to estimate the amount of additional economic activity that might have taken place if prospective investors had found Tanzania’s business environment more attractive. Nor is it possible to make an estimate of the amount of Tanzanian capital that found its way to North America or Western Europe. The critical point nevertheless stands: the depth of the country’s economic decline was to some degree a product of the sheer reluctance of both Tanzanians and foreign investors to engage in economic activities that might expose them to the extractions of bribe-seeking officials. The long-term costs of diverting investments away from productive activity also included flight of human capital as numerous aspiring entrepreneurs fled Tanzania to create business enterprises elsewhere in the world.
Corruption also created an incentive for families to divert their investible savings away from productive entrepreneurial activities altogether and toward the costs involved in acquiring rent-seeking positions. This could be the cost of a graduate degree or the cost of the bribe for appointment to a public sector post. In
