Before we can pronounce a judgment on corruption levels in Africa it is necessary to clearly define what we, in the western world, understand by corruption. Accepting that the majority of people in North America and Europe have been raised within a Judea-Christian culture, our ethical judgments are predisposed towards a value system that is clearly not applicable to every other country in the world. Within some countries in Africa, what we call corruption is simply good business.

According to many western cultures, corruption is the term we apply to any system of government that allows individuals to use their power and influence to gain an unfair socio-economic advantage for themselves at the expense of others. However we could use the same definition for business in general depending on our definition of what is fair or unfair. This is why we have laws and courts to determine whether business is being conducted fairly, there are laws covering fair trading, insider trading, monopolies etc. If there is a high level of corruption in some African countries this could simply be attributed to deficiencies in the legal system. Then again perhaps we also need to look at our own performance in this regard.

Many Africans are inclined to chuckle when they hear westerners go on about high levels corruption. They do so because they fail to see the difference between what happens in the western world and what happens in their own country. It is an interesting exercise to ‘take a stroll in the shoes of the average African worker’ and empathize with their world view. Seen from their perspective, the real problem is not corruption taking place in their own country, but the lack of ‘fairness’ on the part of the rich countries of the world who want more and more of the world’s resources and are prepared to exploit poor countries to fuel their own prosperity.

Many of the ‘successful’ and ‘affluent’ in the western world are inclined to point to a lack of work ethic as being a major contributor to the widespread poverty in Africa. This, combined with what they see as a complacent attitude towards corruption, has led them to believe that nothing good will ever come out of Africa, so ‘why bother’? Others pay lip service to issues such as the world food aid program by handing out what is an ’embarrassing’ economic surplus rather than stimulating and investing in genuine development programs. The combination of political self interest and big business can be devastating to many developing countries. Maybe the answer to the question as to why there are high levels of corruption in Africa is simply that many Africans have lost hope and don’t really care what happens beyond their day to day survival.