Bureaucracy Creates Room For Corruption
Bureaucracy can be defined as “excessively complicated administrative procedures”. You can think of it as protocols that need to be observed to achieve a goal, especially in an institutional setting. A simple example you can think of is getting a driver’s license. Let’s say your goal is to get a driver’s license. Depending on your country of residence, you may need to:
- Go to a driving school
- Graduate from the driving school
- Sit for an exam to test your theoretical knowledge about driving
- Take a practical driving test, supervised by an authority figure
- On passing all tests, receive your driver’s license
You can think of these steps as the bureaucratic processes required to get a driver’s license.
Corruption, on the other hand, can be seen as “dishonest practices by someone in a position of power that leads to giving opportunities to a party that has not earned said opportunities.” Bribes often accompany corruption but it’s not a necessity for corruption to take place.
So what’s the link between bureaucracy and corruption? If it’s not immediately clear, stay with me and let’s take a closer look at a real-world situation to aid understanding.
The Relationship Between Bureaucracy and Corruption
When you have institutions, you need people to run them. While AI is the rave right now, most institutions are still run by people. As established earlier in the article, institutions come with processes and processes are facilitated by people. As such, if a person’s moral compass is not on the right side of the law, they can be prone to bribery and corruption.
In Nigeria, we have an exam called JAMB. It’s an exam people take to get into tertiary institutions to further their education. It was previously written with pen and paper but in recent years, it’s a computer-based multiple choice exam. You would expect that since it’s computer-based, you would get the results immediately. So I find it weird that JAMB results are not given immediately. They are usually withheld for a few days or weeks.
I don’t understand why the results are withheld and may never get answers to this. But what I do know is that because of this delay, they have created room for manipulation of results. Someone has to manually push a button to release the results and the results have to be stored somewhere so if the people in charge of these processes have questionable character, they can receive bribes to alter the results. This example helps to establish the relationship between bureaucracy and corruption.
What is The Impact of Bureaucratic Corruption On Society?
This is a fair question to ask because I’ve only pointed out an isolated situation. Does it have any impact on a larger scale? The answer is yes. You may think that it’s only a small part of the entire educational sector but if you take a little bit of time to think, you’ll notice more “isolated situations.” By the time you put them all together, you have “little pockets of corruption” that have become the order of the day.
The cost of this in the short term is that you end up with “graduates” who are not qualified in their field of study but have gotten by thanks to the decay in the system. The longer-term effect is that society is full of “graduates” who bring nothing to the labour market.
Is It All Worth It?
Should we create room for corruption under the guise of bureaucracy? No, of course not. Corruption leads to the fall of institutions and industries and any nation that wants progress and development needs to put checks in place to curb corruption. A society can’t grow if it’s producing low-quality professionals. We need to rid ourselves of unnecessary bureaucracy that can be exploited and lead to corrupt practices. This would allow us to build a society that has the right foundations to succeed and encourage growth and development.
