Tanzania has been lagging for the past decade, and even regressing in IPI on fiscal transparency and press freedom. Constraints to corruption cannot work with a record low number of e-citizens, and a judiciary and bureaucracy which are not autonomous from private interest. Citizen empowerment by way of extending Internet and Internet literacy, on one hand, and transparency and digitalization reforms, on the other, to make public services more accessible seem the only feasible ways ahead in the absence of some major political overhaul which would shake the existing structure of established rents. Given the lack of independence of the judiciary, repressive anticorruption policies are not advised.
Country: Tanzania
The Anticorruption Report Vol. 4: Beyond the Panama Papers
The final title in the series The Anticorruption Report covers the most important findings of the five-year-long EU-sponsored ANTICORRP project on corruption and organized crime. How prone to corruption are EU funds? Who wins and who loses the anticorruption fight? And can we have better measurements than people’s perceptions to indicate if corruption changes? This issue introduces a new index of public integrity and a variety of other tools created in the project.
The Anticorruption Report Vol. 4: Beyond the Panama Papers looks at the performance of EU Good Governance Promotion in different countries in the European neighbourhood. Case studies focussing on Spain, Slovakia and Romania are considering the impact of EU structural funds and good governance promotion within the Union. Further chapters looking at Turkey, Egypt, Tunisia and Tanzania are analysing EU democracy and good governance support in third countries. The report, edited by Alina Mungiu-Pippidi and Jana Warkotsch offers a comprehensive and overarching look at the successes and pitfalls of the EU’s efforts to democracy promotion and introduces new ways to assess the state of good governance in different countries around the world.
Case study on EU aid and anti‐corruption and governance in Tanzania
Tanzania boasts one of the highest rates of economic growth in Sub-Saharan Africa. In the last decades it also established one of the most harmonised donors frameworks. However, the relationship between Tanzania and its donors has deteriorated significantly in recent years following several high-level corruption cases and slow progress on more complex governance reform. In response, the EU has reformed the composition of its development assistance modalities, which predominantly entailed a reduction in Budget Support, and has stopped committing further aid to Tanzania for the time being. These events indicate considerable limitations to the effectiveness of the EUs (and other donors’) measures to induce good governance through existing modi of development cooperation.
Between condemnation and resignation: Study on Attitudes Towards Corruption in Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania
Tanzania represents one of the well-documented cases of countries in Sub-Saharan Africa where corruption is endemic. This has remained the case in spite of manifold commitments on the part of the regime to fight this problem and of the fact that Tanzania has in place, what is in the opinion of international experts, a state of the art anti-corruption legislation.
This article presents evidence collected through ethnographic research about the attitudes towards corruption of citizens in urban low income areas of Dar es Salaam, the largest city in Tanzania, and explores some of the factors underpinning such attitudes. The research focused on experiences with corruption in the health sector, and on some of the coping strategies that citizens resort to in face of the difficulties encountered when seeking medical attention at public health facilities. With regard to the latter, it is well known that mutual help associations are playing an increasingly important role across Africa, which in turn suggests a relevant set of questions regarding the role that horizontal social networks found in these communities play in relation to prevailing corrupt practices but also regarding their potential role to develop more effective anti-corruption approaches. Regardless of the surge in the NGO “industry”, as denounced by some scholars, witnessed in Tanzania, we are interested in the role of these grassroots level associations as they are exactly of the kind that is expected to generate high levels of social capital, which – in the literature- is associated with favourable governance outcomes.
Anti-corruption as last chapter of democratic revolutions
by: Alina Mungiu-Pippidi
Tarek al-Tayeb Mohamed Bouazizi was a 27 years old Tunisian street vendor who set himself on fire on 17 December 2010, in protest at the confiscation of his wares following an accusation by officials that he was trading illegally. That started the fires of the Tunisian Revolution and then the wider Arab Spring, and he was instantly cast as a hero – after all, then-President Zine El Abidine Ben was a typical predatory leader with a wife who had built herself an unauthorized villa at the UNESCO heritage site of Carthage. But the hero of the Tunisian revolution was in fact avoiding paying tax, like most petty traders in poor countries all around the world. He saw himself as acting legitimately in doing so because the state had done so little for him and his family in his life, while President Ben Ali and his wife prospered. The state could have argued in return that since people like Mr Bouazizi had never paid taxes there were insufficient public resources to offer them much. It might turn out that the money spent on Mrs Ben Ali’s villa and other spoils was insufficient to provide for all those in need of education and health care but who were not paying taxes. In other words, beyond the paradigm of predator and victim, what seems to be the problem in the Tunisian situation is the absence of an agreed social contract between them to avoid both corruption and evasion. Only such a contract would give development a chance.

Crowds in the streets of New Delhi, Sofia and Rio have only recently raised corruption as one of the main banners of their protests. It is not difficult to see why. Most of the 114,000 respondents in 107 countries interviewed for the 2013 Global Corruption Barometer believe that corruption has increased, not decreased in the previous year, two out of three consider that favouritism is the rule rather than the exception in their public services (only a quarter having resorted to bribes in the year previous to survey), over 50% believe their government is captured by vested interests and for every nine people who consider national anti-corruption strategies ineffective we find one who believes they are working.
The reasons why people complain of corruption become obvious when we survey the countries where such perceptions are dominant. New research from the EU FP7 ANTICORRP project shows that corruption comes with a score of malign phenomena which hinder development and well-being. High perception of corruption is significantly associated with low public expenditure on health (the queues outside Brazilian hospitals), but high expenditure on various government projects – from Brazil’s expensive World Cup to Mr. Ben Ali’s grandiose empty mega-mosque – along with reduced absorption of assistance funds, low tax collection, poor returns from public investment and brain drain. In 2013 only citizens in Northern European countries agreed that for the most part advancement in the public or private sector is based on hard work and competence, while for the rest of Europeans favouritism through connections, the most insidious and widespread form of corruption, seems to be the ticket to success in their societies.
Why are elections not taking care of that and in new democracies we continue to have the same problem, which we can document with evidence ranging from the poor rate of tax collection to the fact that the number one source of wealth continues to be power and authority? Why does control of corruption work in most old democracies (though not in all) and in so few new ones (over eighty countries which hold regular free elections are systematically corrupt)? Because for a society to prevent those with power to allocate public resources to their benefit elections seem not to be sufficient- they alone cannot guarantee that whoever gets elected rules by the law and the state treats everyone equally and fairly. In many new democracies political parties are structured as “spoiling machines” of public resources, a historically more evolved organizing vehicle for group benefit after family, clan or tribe, who have learned to coexist fairly well with apparently modern organizations by informally draining them of their impersonal and objective character. The most widespread example is the politicization of the public service in corrupt countries (including hospitals and schools, where jobs are seen as party spoils).
Over 160 countries in the world ratified the United Nations Convention against Corruption pledging to evolve to modernity. But seeing that corruption at a systemic scale is simply an abuse of power, anti-corruption is necessarily a political act. The few countries which succeeded to build control of corruption over the last forty years – countries like Uruguay or Estonia – did not do it through anti-corruption agencies or other silver bullets promoted by the international community, but because a critical mass managed to balance power and elect people who ended the old vicious circle and initiated new rules of the game. For our generation the elimination of privilege and favouritism is the only way to accomplish in full the democratic revolutions started in 1989. Integrity is a public good, and this is why its construction is fraught with collective action problems and translates in this new wave of global discontent – it’s only discontent with the outcome of imperfect democracies and not with democracy itself.
The results of the ANTICORRP project cited here are published in Alina Mungiu-Pippidi (editor) Anticorruption Report 1 (Controlling Corruption in Europe) and Anticorruption Report 2 (The Anticorruption Frontline) which came out from Barbara Budrich publishers in 2013 and 2014.
Alina Mungiu-Pippidi chairs the European Centre for Anticorruption and State Building (ERCAS) at the Hertie School of Governance in Berlin.
Comparative country reports on institutional performance Countries: Bosnia, Kosovo, Hungary, Italy, Mexico, Russia, Tanzania, Turkey.
The report draws on ethnographic research undertaken in 8 countries object of investigation by the WP partners, namely: Italy, Hungary, Bosnia, Russia, Turkey, Kosovo, Tanzania and Mexico. In addition, an additional chapter (Annex 2) will render the case of Japan which will serve as a contrast case on which to assess ideas and practices of governance and institutional performance through an anthropological perspective. The report includes data gathered through a questionnaire survey undertaken, with minor differences, in all the eight countries included in WP4. The data analyzed comparatively refer to three main fields: perceived and experienced performance of local institutions, local problem and resolution ideas, socio- cultural norms and values. We have identified, following the anthropological literature, a number of cultural issues that are in relation with corruption, or with local citizens’ experiences of the functioning of public institutions in their countries. This first deliverable constitutes an attempt to draw some preliminary conclusions on the interaction between socio- cultural features and governance (both as experienced and perceived) which will be further and ethnographically explored in the final deliverable of this Working Package.
Transitions to Good Governance: the Case of Tanzania
This report gives a snapshot of the state of corruption in Tanzania between the years 1998 and 2008. Strong presidents, who have endorsed the fight against corruption, as one of their main presidential goals have been the main drivers of change in Tanzania’s fight against corruption. However, there are many shortcomings that are eminent in Tanzania’s endeavour to fight corruption. Enforcement remains limited and capacity, staff, and resources are lagging. Nonetheless, change in the control of corruption is perceived and real. There are different indicators, one of them being that even “the big fish” have been discharged from major political offices. In 2008, a corruption scandal led to the resignation of the prime minister. These revelations and actual changes demonstrate that corruption is becoming an act that is not tolerated by the population and therefore business – in this case being corruption – cannot be carried out “as usual”.
Transitions to Good Governance: the Case of Tanzania
This report gives a snapshot of the state of corruption in Tanzania between the years 1998 and 2008. Strong presidents, who have endorsed the fight against corruption, as one of their main presidential goals have been the main drivers of change in Tanzania’s fight against corruption. However, there are many shortcomings that are eminent in Tanzania’s endeavour to fight corruption. Enforcement remains limited and capacity, staff, and resources are lagging. Nonetheless, change in the control of corruption is perceived and real. There are different indicators, one of them being that even “the big fish” have been discharged from major political offices. In 2008, a corruption scandal led to the resignation of the prime minister. These revelations and actual changes demonstrate that corruption is becoming an act that is not tolerated by the population and therefore business – in this case being corruption – cannot be carried out “as usual”.