IF you asked someone what made a country progressive, you will probably hear words such as resources, technology, business entrepreneurship and economic jargon such as proper fiscal and monetary policies and such like.
But what really makes a country tick is its people. Productive, enterprising, innovative and imaginative people can turn an arid and barren land into a nation to contend with, a tiny insignificant island with no resources into a world trading centre and communications hub.
To build nations, people must work together in its organisations and institutions to achieve their respective goals. But far too often, these goals are ignored in favour of self-interest and gain. The organisation cannot function the way it was meant to. It has become corrupted. Many a time senior management is guilty of ignoring the organisation’s standards. They undermine the very principles of behaviour they preach to their workers. They are hypocritical.
No individual can perform to his or her full capacity unless they are free of all personal inhibitions.
In the language of the business environment, performance is good when staff morale is high. Just as importantly, the performance of individuals is seriously inhibited when they think they cannot perform as well as others. This sense of inferiority or low personal esteem has far-reaching effects on the overall progress of nations as a whole. It can lead to whole groups of people thinking that they are inferior to other groups, leading to the establishment of racial relativities that can only be harmful for the nation.
Corruption, hypocrisy and low self-esteem are three of the greatest barriers to progress in any country, and especially in our young, fledgling Pacific island nation.
Defining corruption
There are several different ways of defining corruption. In its most obvious form, corruption is the gain of money in return for unfair or illegal provision of goods or services. It includes bribery and fraudulent money conversion. If we expand the definition to include unfair provision of opportunity, we suddenly realise how widespread the problem is.
Organisations operate according to corporate or strategic plans. It is little secret that often, groups with their own agenda form within an organisation, which may be at variance with the corporate plan. The result is an undermining of the corporate plan. The internal groups are often formed to strengthen the position of the group leader within the organisation, a process commonly known as “empire building”. An organisation with such groups may be termed as a corrupted organisation.
What is wrong with corruption?
Corrupt systems or entities are unable to function properly because something is wrong inside them. The best way to picture this is to think of a corrupt computer disk. Something has gone wrong with it, and this error is preventing it from performing the way it should, sometime preventing it from performing at all. It is easy to see that the “corruption” is the result of bits or bytes of memory having being changed or destroyed.
The same applies to human and institutional corruption. The corruption here is in the moral or ethical rules of behaviour, or of undermining certain procedures and processes the institution depends on to function properly.
How hypocrisy arises within organisations
The entire organisation itself may become corrupt when it begins to undermine its own values and internal standards. This may happen if the senior management wants to achieve the objectives through expeditious means which among other things, undermine the welfare and well-being of its employees. An example may be where the CEO expedites the achievement of the objectives through hiring employees loyal to him, and thus builds his personal empire, at the expense of more meritorious candidates. In more extreme cases he may even “fix” the figures and hide unproductive outcomes to present an overall picture of excellence in performance.
It is relatively easy for large organisations with public standing and adequate funds to hide their corrupt actions. They can use glossy publications and impressive public statements about their performance to present the best picture of the organisation while suppressing the problems. And they use techniques of public persuasion to present an image of themselves as being “above reproach”, so it becomes exceedingly difficult to point out their misdeeds. As a result, these organisations become all powerful, and can ignore their own standards to achieve what they want. They have become experts in the art of hypocrisy.
Fighting corruption
Corruption is not always easy to fight. Bribery is easy enough to handle, as it is an easily understood wrongdoing. But when it comes to things such as non-meritorious promotion or empire-building, the situation is much more difficult to detect, let alone fix.
Normally the internal self-interest groups are detrimental and must be strongly discouraged. This becomes a test of the management skills of the establishment. Usually it uses various tools such as KPIs and performance-based rewards and promotion. Whether these will prevent the building of empires and formation of individual fiefdoms within the larger ambit of the organisation is dubious, as they don’t even so much as acknowledge the formation of such groups.
Self-esteem matters
Performance is clearly affected by a person’s self-image. In the first place it affects his or her morale. But more importantly, it lowers his own assessment of his ability to perform.
Inverted racism is an example of low self-esteem. It is where you think you have lower ability to do things than people of other ethnicities. This naturally leads to your perception of people of your own racial type as being inferior to other races.
During the post-colonial era (1970-1987) many of us thought we were well on our way to eliminating this socio-economic scourge. Our people were getting educated, and as the oldies died off, we were sure the old inter-racial attitudes would go with them. Thus it is shocking to see the resurgence of the malaise in our youth of today. Surely there is something wrong with the social evolution of our beloved country.
Inverted racism is usually quite involuntary. People begin favouring the perceived superior race without any prompting or reason. Often it is subconscious, which is worse since they don’t even realise they are doing it.
Inverted racism breeds low self-confidence. This is a key factor holding back the development of the country. It contributes to the problem of continuing dependence on foreign expertise for jobs we can do ourselves. During the post-colonial era we talked about localisation of jobs, with every expectation that we could eliminate our foreign-dependency for expertise with time.
Some 30 years later, this could not be further from the truth with foreign consultants and experts gleefully populating every aspect of our economic infrastructure. The mind-set entrenched during the colonial era still persists. Actually, it was never in any danger of dying.
Why worry about self-esteem?
If the problem persists, it will seriously retard the personal development of Fijians from individuals who can stand up and be reckoned with anyone else on an equal footing into poor members of the global community. We want Fijians to be truly upstanding global citizens, people who think they are inferior to no one.
The first step to solving the problem is to acknowledge its existence and its active discussion in public forums. Perhaps there is room for a donor-funded equal rights movement that addresses this particular issue.
Corruption, hypocrisy and low self-image are three key barriers to national progress. But so far, our political aspirants have only considered one of them in any detail. If we want to see Fiji become an equal member of the global community, it is time we gave all three the consideration they deserve.
* Anirudh Singh is an associate professor at USP. Readers may share their views by emailing anirudh_singh2005@hotmail.com. The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not reflect the views of the institutions he is associated with nor those of this newspaper.
