Editor,

RE: "How morally fit is the West to lead a global campaign on corruption?” (The New Times, May 19).

A very rhetorical question; the long and short of it is, not at all morally fit. They are fully complicit in the corruption of those they and their media love to point fingers at with the clear intention of making it look as if, by contrast, they themselves are paragons of rectitude.

The reality is the West, its banks, multinational corporations, other important institutions, and powerful individuals are the principal instigators and beneficiaries of the corruption that afflicts our countries.

What is more, whenever any leader of a developing country emerges and tries to put an end to these corrupt arrangements and clean out the existing Augean stables of corruption so that the country’s resources can first and foremost benefit its people, such a leader is quickly ousted, often including by assassination, by the foreign powers whose interests are affected by such anti-corruption efforts working in tandem with their local compradors who similarly oppose any anti-corruption efforts that might reduce the rents they had previously enjoyed from their relationship as partners of and/or agents of those foreign interests who control and benefit most from the country’s most valuable resources.

And so claims of the West’s moral fitness to lead an anti-corruption campaign in non-western regions when powerful interests in that same West are the principal beneficiaries of that corruption can only strike any informed person as the usual expressions of shameless hypocrisy.

Mwene Kalinda

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The author has totally miscast the question and your response does no better. Corruption is not a moral issue. It is an economic issue as a very successful fight against the scourge demonstrates.

In the immediate post-medieval era the English monarchy made corruption extremely expensive. Culprits were hanged, drawn and quartered and corpses left to rot along the London Bridge. It sent a powerful message.

In more recent times the Chinese followed a similar policy minus the gruesomeness but involving death. In other jurisdictions, the penalties have been severe, too. Enron bosses in the US paid dearly for their crimes. Many took their own lives.

What this background points to is this: corruption is combatable as long as incentives and disincentives are structured right.

The rest of your jeremiad about developing countries’ leaders being lured and seduced by the corrupt West is pure gibberish. The victim mentality I have cautioned you against to not avail.

Nigeria’s Muhammadu Buhari is going about it right. Make it costly. That, by the way is how Rwanda’s sometimes idol Singapore’s Lee turned around a swampy corrupt cesspool that was the domain he inherited into a relatively corruption free place.

I teach a course in controlling corruption. This had to be a long response.

Imboko Ndiranga