Honest Politicians Will Not Take Away Corruption

The good news is that the world is filled with corruption. The bad news is that the way many are trying to fight corruption is ineffective. Very often, the effort is made in searching and strengthening the honest leader, who promises to solve the problem. Around the globe, candidates who compete for official positions make highly custom anti-corruption platforms, offering themselves as a solution. What countries need, in fact, are wise laws that will reduce the promotion and opportunities for corruption. These countries also require strong institutions that would reinforce those laws and deprive corrupt officials and their private sector collaborators of impunity in their efforts to enrich themselves at the expense of public spending.

But increased global failure to deal with corruption is evident in the rise of anti-corruption fighters under the clothing of political candidates. Anti-corruption protests are massive and extend throughout the world India, Mexico, Bulgaria, Russia and Thailand. Citizens there and elsewhere no longer believe that corruption is inevitable or that it is futile to fight.

The impact of these popular protests has been surprising. The presidents of Guatemala and South Korea, for example, have been thrown down and imprisoned. In Brazil, major gears conditioned President Dilma Roussef to be tried.

It's comforting to see corrupt leaders withdraw from power. But that does not imply that an honest political leader is the best antidote to countering corruption.

Associations based on an honest leader to solve their problems are always lost. These leaders can turn out to have integrity or not. Silvio Berlusconi, Vladimir Putin and Hugo Chavez all came to power, promising to lift corruption. And we know what that proved.

Very often, anti-corruption fighters have served as mechanisms for political depression. The world's authorities exploit popular intolerance of corrupt politicians to eliminate their rivals. Vladimir Putin often accuses those who become very influential of being corrupt and throw them into prison. Mikhail Khodorkovsky, once Russia's richest man, spent 10 years in Siberia for tax evasion and theft. He has also actively financed politicians and anti-Putin parties.

Since Xi Jinping assumed the Chinese presidency in 2012, more than one million officials have been sentenced to corruption. Some received death sentences. In the anti-corruption sweep, Mohammed bin Salman, Saudi prince has recently arrested the centre of important Saudi figures, including the world's largest wealthy, Prince Al Waled bin Talal. The governments of Cuba, Iran and Venezuela regularly use accusations of corruption to imprison their political officers. No doubt, there are also real corrupt individuals among those imprisoned by dictators. But the real reasons for these arrests have more to do with politics than with the dishonesty of these people.

Fighting corruption has nothing to do with corruption, however. In Argentina, Cuba, Colombia, Peru and Uruguay, the Inter-American Development Bank [ The IADB is supporting public innovation labs that experiment with new methods of monitoring and controlling governments. In Brazil, a group of data analysis experts have used artificial intelligence techniques to monitor public officials. They have focused closely on restricting bribery among members of Congress that required remuneration for travel and food expenses; after receiving mass financing for their expenses, they created Rosien, a robot of Artificial Intelligence that analyzes the requirements for repurchasing lawmakers and calculates the possibility of their justification. To no one's surprise, Rosie found that MPs were cheating very quickly. The team gave Rosiet a Twitter account, and its followers are constantly notified whether a member of the Congress tries to convey to the government spending that has nothing to do with his or her work.

Rosie is just a small example of positive trends and new opportunities in fighting corruption, it reveals the power of well-organised society combined with technological innovation and transparency in the public sector.

True, an example of a country dense with corruption may seem too small. It's easy to take Rosie as a marginal effort that doesn't make much noise on a large scale. Case: While some MPs charge some of their personal expenses to the state, over a period of 15 years the Brazilian construction company Odebrecht paid 800m dollars in bribes across the entire hemisphere to benefit $3.3 billion from the scheme. And yet here, there has been progress. Marcelo Obrecht, chief of the company, was sentenced to 19 years in prison. And members of the Brazilian convention can at least think more before they abuse their repurchasings. Rossey's watching you at Orwell's Big Brother.

Subtitle by: Periscope