Six rules for fighting corruption

15 November 1998

The recent upsurge of corruption scandals signals a big change. The upsurge doesn’t mean that corruption is on the increase. Rather, exposure of corruption is on the increase. Many of the examples now coming to light have been going on for years. The FDA advertising-approvals scam has been in place for a couple of decades. Thousands of people know how it works and who is involved. But nobody blew the whistle - until now. The scandals in the traffic police and education ministry are just as well-established. "Corruption," said a health official, "is a disease which has long plagued this ministry".

Why the change? Probably the crisis has reduced people’s tolerance. But also, the attacks on corruption by press, academics and opinion-leaders have built up to a critical point.

In the past year, there has been a significant change in the type of scandal exposed. We had got used to the ‘political smash-and-grab’ type, where a minister takes a 10-25 percent kickback on a contract and then dives for political cover. But the recent scandals have focused on the more systematic, long-run siphoning of money within government departments. The scandals in the education, health and agriculture ministries have exposed alliances between politicians and top bureaucrats to exploit very established systems for milking inflated margins on procurement contracts. These systems are built into the structure of bureaucratic practice. Many people are involved. Even more know about them but keep quiet, often because their silence is bought for a small sum. This "syndicated corruption" is part of the culture of the bureaucracy.

But exposing such corruption is not easy. Just making things public and naming a few names is not enough. The defence mechanisms are very strong. Big people hang together and throw up smokescreens. Little people are persuaded to stay silent ("many people have been forced to go along with this corruption", noted one health official). Consider how crude and how ambitious both the seeds and drug scandals were. Huge mark-ups. Flaky companies to act as the collection device. Crude circumvention of ministry rules. Lots of people involved. The big men who planned these schemes were neither careful nor subtle. They thought they could get away with anything.

But the rural doctors have provided us with a case study of how these obstacles can be overcome. So far they have felled two ministers and three senior officials, put several other officials under threat, made public the techniques of corruption inside the health ministry, and started a domino effect across other departments. So, if you want to start fighting corruption, here are a few rules to follow, based on their example.

Rule 1. Be a rural doctor. Because of their education, dedication and low income, the rural doctors have an unusual degree of moral authority. This was critical to their success. The first line of defence of the top officials was to counter-attack and claim that their accusers were corrupt, that the rural doctors themselves were on the take. This is a textbook defence manoeuvre. Usually it works. Onlookers get confused, and the scandal sinks into a marsh of conflicting accusations. But in this case, the manoeuvre was completely ineffective. Nobody believed the rural doctors are on the take.

Also, the rural doctors work day-to-day with ordinary people. Lots of them. When the counter-accusation failed, the accused rolled out the second standard defence manoeuvre - take no notice and hope the scandal will disappear. But the doctors threatened to mobilise mass support. And their threat was totally believable.

Of course, not everybody who wants to fight corruption can become a rural doctor. The point is, their example shows some of the key attributes needed for success: the moral authority which comes from education and dedication, and the potential for mobilising mass support.

Rule 2. Be organised. The camaraderie among the rural doctors goes back to medical school. Their society has existed for years and was founded for very practical reasons: the doctors work in remote areas with few resources, and they need a system for sharing information and experience.

The society sheltered the doctors against the third standard defence manoeuvre: identify the leaders and neutralise them through money, intimidation or whatever it takes. It was clear from the start that picking on a few individuals was not going to be effective.

The Rural Doctors Society is interesting in another way. In one sense, it is inside the ministry it is attacking. This is important. Other scandals (such as in the police, forestry and education departments) have tended to go nowhere because there is no strong leadership inside the ministry under attack. But in another sense, the Rural Doctors Society is not an official part of the ministry structure. It is just a chomrom (club). It is not vulnerable to another favourite defence tactic: smother with bureaucratic rules and customs of seniority.

Rule 3. Bite and don’t let go. The most powerful weapon of the defence is time. Scandals are vulnerable to the short attention-span of the public. The press always wants something new. Most corruption scandals die of boredom.

But the rural doctors did not give up. They simply kept repeating the main accusations, over and over again. In face of the usual smokescreens (it's just bureaucratic in-fighting; it’s linked to the internal conflicts of the cabinet coalition; it’s just one instance blown out of all proportion; it’s all a mistake; etc), they kept hammering away. The scandal first emerged over 3 months ago, and they are still at it. In the Thai phrase, they kat mai ploi.

Rule 4. Escalate. When the minister stated any wrongdoing was "the work of opportunists", the rural doctors insisted the culprits were senior officials and politicians. When he tried to silence the early publicity, the doctors demanded an enquiry. When the minister conceded an internal enquiry, they demanded an independent outsider. When the enquiry reported, they demanded the minister resign. When he finally agreed, they demanded his deputy go too. When the deputy slunk away, they demanded replacements come from anywhere but the Social Action Party. When many hoped the cabinet reshufffle would conclude the affair, they demanded a full enquiry and prosecutions.

Rule 5. Be clever with publicity. To show the extent of the price scam, the press was invited to photograph a doctor festooned with drugs and equipment carrying price tags. An 80-year old ex-health minister sobbed on live TV over the moral collapse of his old ministry. Questionnaire surveys collected data from doctors in the provinces.

Because of the abject failure of the judicial system to combat corruption, the media have become a public court of appeal. But the media need material to convey information and to keep a story alive. Particularly in the early stages of the drug scam, the rural doctors generated publicity material which helped people to understand a complex event, and which kept the affair in public view.

Rule 6. Mobilise allies. The rural doctors first got support from close allies such as rural pharmacists and health officials. Then they expanded the network to NGOs, academics, the Law Society, and the Student Federation. Universities arranged public seminars. Assumption College conducted a public poll. Prominent public figures like Prawase Wasi adopted a leading role.

The parliamentary opposition has never built a tradition of championing public causes. This role belongs to the network of NGOs, academics, public intellectuals and public-interest associations. Nowadays this network is sophisticated and quick to move into action.

These are six good rules to start with. But they are not yet enough. The doctors have felled a few key figures and probably intimidated many more. But they have not got what they demand: a full clean-up of the systematic corruption inside the health ministry. The systems, and some key names, were published in the Thai press (Krungthep Thurakit and Daily News) in late August. But the affair still threatens to disappear into the netherworld of investigatory committees.

Many believe that the cure for corruption lies in better laws and better monitoring. They put their faith in the tighter provisions and strengthened counter-corruption machinery in the new constitution. But legal process is still compromised by the poor performance of the judicial system. For the moment, public scandalisation is the only effective counter-corruption strategy.

But it only goes so far without some action from the executive. Here Chuan Leekpai has a problem. He understands that something new is happening in public politics. At the inauguration of the reshuffled cabinet, he told his ministers: "Things are not as they were… Politicians are being watched by everyone - the people, the opposition. the media and private organisations … I will not protect any Cabinet member who is found to be dishonest." But he hates conceding to public pressure. He insists that corruption charges must follow "rabop", the proper system or process. But the system does not work. Also, he has allied himself with some of Thailand’s more corrupt politicians to build a parliamentary majority, and he feels he has to stand by them. Despite his stirring speech to the cabinet, he did defend the health minister against the rural doctors’ allegations, until well after the evidence seemed overwhelming.

Chuan understands that big changes are happening in public politics. But he is stuck in an old political game. Many feel he has given his stirring anti-corruption speech once too often to be credible. Come the next election, he may indeed discover that "things are not as they were".