Daily Times

Robert Klitgaard (author and professor) postulates that corruption will occur if the corrupt gain is greater than the penalty multiplied by the likelihood of being caught and prosecuted. According to Stephan (research group), the moral dimension has an intrinsic and an extrinsic component. The intrinsic component refers to a mentality problem, the extrinsic component to external circumstances like poverty, inadequate remuneration, inappropriate work conditions and inoperable or overcomplicated procedures which demoralize people and let them search for “alternative” solutions.

Freud discussed his model of Id, Ego and Super Ego in his essay “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” wherein he defined Id as the completely unconscious, impulsive, childlike portion of the psyche that operates on the “pleasure principle”. The super-ego is the moral component of the psyche, which takes into account no special circumstances in which the morally right thing may not be right for a given situation. The rational ego attempts to exact a balance between the impractical hedonism of the id and the equally impractical morals of the super-ego. It is the part of the psyche that is usually reflected most directly in a person’s actions. When overburdened or threatened by its tasks, it may employ defence mechanisms such as denial, repression, undoing, rationalisation, and displacement.

The analysis of our corruption scenario reflects that corrupt people develop their personality around the pleasure driven Id for gratification of their desires. They learn temper with ethical and legal standards of super ego and develop an ego within ego. That means good ego for looking good and bad ego creates a new environment around them that help them commit corruption with no real sense of guilt. Same kinds of people team up for ripping off the country.

We have three classes in our country: corrupt, willing to be corrupt and no to be corrupt. On moral level they are skilful in cajoling, lying and tempering the system. These soapbox orators contribute to further aggravate the corrupt scenarios through their poisonous communication they infect our society.

Ironically corrupt people don’t like intelligence and merit therefore infuse mediocrity in our system and that keeps their self esteem intact and easily justify diffusion of high ethics with misuse of power, ill earned money and a euphoria of global glamour. Their ego refers to Ana Freud’s defence mechanism use different kinds of defences by using institutions, standing or inquiry committees, parliamentary sessions, controlling media and irrational statements.

While tempering with Super ego people entrusted with authority and power forget that the unethical standards, selfish values and corrupted norm, negative thinking patterns, potent criminal traits and untoward traditions eventually backlash on their own family cultures. Such cultures breed infected honesty and contaminated integrity, valueless values and inappropriate norms, diseased state of minds and dried intellectualism, spiritually degraded and morally plagued social justice system wherein our Leading Class sow the wind and the whole nation reaps the whirlwind.

Proactive limitless money making practice through illegal means and developing a lifestyle that attracts others to follow suit without any reasonable justifications increase the temptations for those people who just search opportunity to fulfil their desires through positive means. This phenomenon is one of the reasons that a visible portion of our people look for short cut to success.

When we live in a cross cultural society only then we can understand what we don’t have as a nation. Is there any short cut to success excepting hard work for long time? Corrupt people exchange confidence and morality with aggressive shamelessness. When Pandora box of evil designs opens these criminals defy it with full zeal and spirit. They know time delaying tactics, mis-tractions and counteract methods to divert the pressure of masses from a particular issue.

Corruption is a global phenomenon. It is a form of unethical conduct by a person entrusted with a position of authority to acquire personal benefit. Corruption may include bribery and embezzlement, fraud, theft, nepotism, cronyism, favouritism, clientele, abuse of discretion, wrong decision making, kickbacks, extortion, blackmail, and misappropriation of Government funds, electoral rigging and negligence.

There are different categories of corruption, white-collar crime refers to financially motivated nonviolent crime committed by business and government professionals. Typical white-collar crimes include fraud, bribery, Ponzi schemes, insider trading, embezzlement, cybercrime, copyright infringement, money laundering, identity theft, and forgery.

Association of Certified Fraud Examiners estimate the annual cost of white collar crime money fall between $300 and $660 billion in USA. Corporate crime occurs when corporate executives commit criminal acts to benefit their company by overcharging or price fixing, false advertising etc. Blue-collar crime depend on the people employed in relatively unskilled environments and living in inner-city areas have fewer opportunities to exploit than those who work in areas where there is relative prosperity. Examples of blue collar crime are vandalism, shoplifting, murder, theft and plunder.

Organised transnational crime is organised criminal activity that takes place across national jurisdictions. Some examples include human trafficking, money laundering, drug smuggling, illegal arms dealing, terrorism, and cybercrime. An international think-tank, assembled statistics on several aspects of transnational crime in 2009 is world illicit trade is approximately $780 billion, counterfeiting and piracy is between $300 billion to $1 trillion and global drug trade is estimated $321 billion.

Public sector corruption includes corruption of the political process and of government agencies such as the police as well as corruption in processes of allocating public funds for contracts, grants and hiring. Recent research by the World Bank suggests that policy decisions maker’s role is more influential in determining the level of corruption. It can also take the form of office holders maintaining themselves in office by purchasing votes. Police misconduct designed to obtain financial benefits, personal gain, and/or career advancement for a police officer or officers in exchange for not pursuing, or selectively pursuing, an investigation or arrest. One common form of police corruption is soliciting and/or accepting bribes in exchange for not reporting organised drug or prostitution rings or other illegal activities.

Judicial corruption refers to corruption related misconduct of judges, through receiving or giving bribes, improper sentencing of convicted criminals, bias in the hearing and judgement of arguments and other such misconduct. Transparency International (TI) Pakistan reported that the highest amounts of bribery were spent on people affiliated with the judiciary.

Corruption in education is a worldwide phenomenon. Corruption in admissions to universities is traditionally considered as one of the most corrupt areas of the education sector. In the 2010, TI Pakistan reported that about 23.7 per cent of those surveyed received admission in educational institutions through non-normal and alternate procedures. In 2010, 42 per cent of surveyed individuals reported gaining access to hospital services by a method other than standard admission, and 48 per cent reported either having to pay additional costs for essential services. In this sector Musa Gilani case, PMDC registration case medicine efficacy issues and manipulating tender are few worth attention seeking issues are at hand.

As of 2002, 96 per cent of surveyed individuals reported corruption issues with electrical utility officials during the past year. The most common types of corruption were billing related. According to the 2002 study, 99 per cent of 256 respondents reported facing corruption of taxation. Furthermore, 32 per cent of respondents reported paying bribes to have their tax assessment lowered, and nearly 14 per cent reported receiving fictitious tax assessments until a bribe was paid. Due to all these facts in 2014, Pakistan scored 126 out of 174 on the Corruption Perception Index and India and China scored 75 and 100 respectively.

During the Musharraf regime owing to limited scale Kargil Battle, the media came out of the clutches of tightly controlled government regulations because they lost media war against more mature Indian media. Obviously delayed decision but at least after that media started making progress by leaps and bounds and now during any international controversies the Pakistani media goes head to head with Indian media.

The free and powerful and comparatively untrained media suitable more for working class became profoundly influential and succeeded to impress upper class within short span of time. The media and related professionals succeeded to expose various serious cases of corruption during the past few years that including cases of bribery and corruption in government-owned enterprises like Pakistan International Airlines and Pakistan Railways, Steel Mills case, rental power projects scam, PMDC fake registrations, Hajj corruption case, OGRA scam, NATO container case, NICL corruption case, eupherdine quota case and mediagate scandal. These are beyond a shadow of doubt big achievements for our print and electronic media that reduced the level of corruption and strengthen the roots of democracy. A more discipline, organised, investigative, unbiased, associated media can change the course of ongoing deterioration of economy of our country from further corruption and other malpractices.

For our anchors, speakers, hosts and writers we need to introduce courses and training sessions, best practice seminars and tightly integrated association with members at grass root level so that they could get training and proactively compete in international market. In different areas of international profile we need to upgrade and equip ourselves with technological advancement and linguistics so that our media could win media wars on national and international fronts if the need arises.

But the landscape of hope to change the bleak scenario of frustration into a beacon light of trust and faith appear to be under the dark cloud. Our media has the potential to build a clear thoughtful notion regarding our problems. Every dark cloud has a silver lining. In the era of controlled democracy we the media professionals still have capability to mobilise institutions and make things better. We can do even better I am very hopeful.