The issue that could undermine the government
The Vietnamese have never seen anything like it: more than 100
government officials arrested, some 50 police officers suspended from
duty, and two members of the all-powerful Central Committee expelled from
the ruling Communist Party. It is hard to find an official in Ho Chi Minh
city, it seems, who was not in cahoots with Nam Cam, a local crime boss.
Over the past eight months, a much-publicised investigation has implicated
public prosecutors, prison wardens and journalists, among others, in the
gangster's drug, prostitution and protection rackets. The arrests are
proof, say Vietnam's rulers, that they are serious about fighting
corruption, which has spread since the introduction of market reforms in
the late 1980s. In fact, the government's attitude is not so clear-cut.
But the scandal certainly is proof of how widespread corruption has
become, and how hard it will be to uproot.
Transparency International, a global counter-corruption watchdog,
ranks Vietnam as the second most corrupt country in South-East Asia (after
Indonesia), based on a survey of international businessmen. The Vietnamese
government itself recently estimated that light-fingered bureaucrats cream
off at least 20% of infrastructure spending. At the National Assembly in
July, the prime minister, the speaker, and the secretary-general of the
Communist Party all identified corruption as one of the government's main
challenges.
With good reason: ordinary Vietnamese gripe about corruption far more
often than they do, say, about the regime's restriction of political
freedoms. It is the chief rallying cry of dissidents, and the most
frequent cause of popular protests. The party's chief ambition, now that
it has abandoned Marxism, seems to be the maintenance of its own power.
Public disenchantment brought on by corruption is one of the biggest
threats to that cause.
Yet the regime's response so far, whatever its public stance, seems
half-hearted. Suspicions persist that the Nam Cam affair might go even
higher than the two Central Committee members--but the investigation will
not. There is no reason to imagine that Ho Chi Minh is the only big city
with greasy-palmed apparatchiks, but there is no sign of a crackdown
elsewhere. A deputy prime minister, sacked for corruption in 1999, is back
in an advisory role. Proposals for legal reform will take years to
implement. The cautious government still allows only a summary of its
budget to be published, and is even dragging its feet over a proposed
survey, to be paid for by a Swedish government agency, to establish just
how widespread corruption is.
The cynical explanation for all this holds that the government is
simply doing the minimum to dispel public anger. More charitable observers
insist that it is genuinely determined to tackle corruption, but in the
same cautious, consensual manner with which it has approached every
sensitive subject from the adoption of market reforms to the restoration
of ties with the United States. Those two steps, however, pandered to the
interests of senior officials--many of whom have businesses on the side--
by expanding the scope for private enterprise. This time around, the
opposite is the case: the same officials who commit many of the abuses
will now be charged with putting a stop to them. Appointing an independent
anti-graft agency would be anathema to the party, which insists on
preserving a parallel bureaucracy to enforce its will over the main one.
On corruption as with all pressing issues, the party faces the same
paradox: to preserve its power, it must relinquish some.
Economist Newspaper Ltd - September 14, 2002.
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