In contemporary times, democracy is particularly understood as the motivator of socio-economic growth of any nation. The end of 20th century followed the boom of democracy in various underdeveloped nations in Africa, South-America and Asia. However, democracy has not been as promising as expected, in term of its contribution to the national growth. Instead, the transition towards the pseudo-democratic government brought a plethora of corruption culture in the developing economies of the world.
Obviously, democracy in general, is not the sure ticket to the national socio-economic betterment of any country. In order to retrieve the most out of a democratic structure, a nation should incorporate the perfect balance of electoral competition and restraints in its ingredient of democracy in order to embark the system of check and balance. (Collier, 2007)
In compared to other democratic under-developed nations (politically referred as developing nations) of the world, Nepal has secured better democracy in terms of number of electoral competitions performed and the perceived amount of public restraints through free media. Although, there still lays a considerable disagreement regarding the degree of press freedom in Nepal, it is logical to assume that Nepal retains enough public restraints in basis to the degree of information freedom to theoretically prevent the kind of corruption and political patronage that is already existent in the country. Certainly, the qualitative judgment over the state of press freedom of Nepal would not comply with the country’s miserable score of mere 2.2 out of 10 in government transparency. (Transparency International, 2012, Corruption perception Index) However, it is until and unless we ignore the other important variable regarding the enforcement of judiciary and laws. Certainly, the country is visibly wounded in its faction of judiciary and law enforcement in the sense that, the country is still deprived of permanent constitution and proper laws enforcement against corruption. Furthermore, higher chances for corruption accused government personnel to escape the legitimate judiciary decision through bribery have always questioned the strength of law enforcement in Nepal. Ironically, Nepalese Media has often been successful in flashing out such unlawful acts while government is often unable to reconcile the publicized mistakes. Probably, the blend of stronger public media and weaker law enforcement has been the activator of dwindling trust in government by Nepalese citizen.
Likewise, it is convincing for newly democratic nations with abundant easy money natural resource like oil and diamond to fall into the prey of corruption. (Collier, 2007) The possibility to pocket big money through resource export revenues, in a short span of power tenure and the freedom from the obligation to be transparent in the government budget due to the lack of reliance on public tax, is politically understandable in resource abundant developing nations. In fact, it was the most logical reason for newly democratic Nigerian government to fall into the state of massive corruption. (Aderoju Oyefusi, 2007) Unlike Nigeria and other resource abundant developing countries, Nepal is a tax dependent country and the geo-economy of Nepal doesn’t enable the potentiality for the corrupt government to pocket big money from the existent natural resource. Therefore, there exists a dilemma regarding the source of motivation for the current scale of corruption and political patronage even with relatively low potentiality of earning corrupt money and the high responsibility of the government to be transparent through restraints factors like Tax dependency and Media strength.
In regard to this, it is logical to argue that, the loose state of judiciary and law enforcement in the country has made it feasible for the government to practice corruption even for relatively small bucks in a relatively high restraint environment.
In acknowledgement to the illegal routing from national Inland Revenue, public enterprises and other sources, considerable motivation towards corruption incentive can be attributed to the historical mal-behavior of Nepalese citizen to bribe public administration and the easy-to-misuse foreign aids. (Sujeev Shakya, 2010)
Nepalese Public alike to everyone else in the world seems to be under the false conception that democracy is the sure ticket to ditch poverty and stagnancy. However, democracy in its purest form also needs to incorporate ample amount of checks and balance in order to route its advantage towards national progress. Unfortunately, the structure of Nepalese democracy seems to lack this particular component due to the prevalence of inefficient judiciary and law enforcement.
Note: Media Freedom is understood be the restraint factor with the heaviest weight. (Collier, P., 2007)
Research Recommendation:
- Identifying the numerical factor regarding Press freedom and its regression analysis against corruption incentive.
- Identifying the numerical factor regarding judicial strength and its regression analysis against corruption analysis.
- Identifying the numerical factor regarding dependency of the nation over precious resource and its regression analysis to boost corruption incentive.
References:
- Collier, P. (2007), Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries are failing and what can be done about it. Oxford university press
2. Shakya, S. (2010), Unleashing Nepal.
3. Aderoju Oyefusi (2007), Oil-dependence and Civil conflict in Nigeria
Analytical Perspective on Economics 