By Mai Ahmad Fatty
No one will deny that corruption is a global phenomenon, not least in The Gambia. However, the survey, the basis for percentage points, which remains shrouded in mystery, must be properly analysed within objective Gambian context. The survey is biased and highly lacking in contextual substance because it approached corruption from one angle only. Evidently, a biased unicameral approach can only produce a distorted conclusion. If the context is defective, the credibility of the survey will be doubtful, as indeed it is. To my mind, any proper and credible approach to corruption that is unbiased and apolitical, must take into cognizance the very mechanics and dynamics of corruption in The Gambia. This survey regrettably focused exclusively on the public sector, intentionally avoiding private sector corruption. It means the survey cannot holistically represent the true perception of corruption or corrupt practices in The Gambia. Without private sector corrupt practices, perceived public sector corruption cannot survive. By private sector, it includes individual Gambian citizens or society.
Admittedly, corruption represents economic terrorism that systematically assassinates development and murders collective prosperity. The Gambia’s 2024 Corruption Perceptions Index score of 38 out of 100, ranking 96th globally in the “red zone,” reflects not statistical failure but stolen opportunities from future generations. Corruption inflates project costs by 20-30%, diverts resources from essential services, and creates environments where merit dies on monetary altars. This existential threat concerns every citizen, yet paradoxically, citizens themselves fuel the corruption machine.
Yet, in The Gambia, corruption’s mechanics reveal irrefutable truth. It requires willing participants on both sides. For every corrupt official receiving bribes, citizens offer them. The Gambian context exposes alarmingly low moral compunction about bribing for essential services; citizens approaching law enforcement to buy justice, customs officers to evade duties, immigration for passport facilitation, schools for unqualified admissions, traffic police for improper licenses, lack of proper vehicle papers or traffic offenses, and so forth.
This national malaise demonstrates extremely low public tolerance for corruption in rhetoric but extremely high tolerance in practice. Without active public participation, corruption cannot exist. Citizens are not passive victims. Rather, they are active co-conspirators creating the corruption ecosystem.
The responsibility distribution would reveal contributory negligence by the citizenry; a willing public obsessed with preferential treatment that provokes inducement, partnered with public sectors willing to participate. Citizens create the demand, help set prices, and establish precedent that every public interaction can be monetized. They approach officials not demanding proper service delivery but offering pre-emptive financial inducements, normalising corruption as acceptable bureaucratic navigation.
Public officials do respond to citizen-created demand but did not exclusively create it. Citizens bear responsibility as the demand side of this corrupt equation.
The intellectually dishonest notion that corruption exists only within the government must be categorically dismantled. Private sector, citizenry, and public sector form interconnected webs where corruption cannot thrive without all three components’ active participation. Private companies offer inducements for contracts; citizens approach officials with corrupt offers while simultaneously demanding integrity. The level of hypocrisy is staggering.
Without citizen participation, government corruption would collapse overnight. Officials cannot be corrupt in isolation; they require willing partners, and citizens eagerly fill this role.
The ongoing Local Government Commission investigations reveal massive, unprecedented corruption across all municipalities, with some not under the ruling party’s control. This destroys partisan narratives and exposes corruption as a systemic citizen-driven phenomenon transcending party lines.
The Janneh Commission findings exposed how private individuals and companies systematically induced authorities into sustained corruption, looting over US$304 million from national coffers. These were not passive victims but active architects designing sophisticated circumvention methods.
The National Audit Office provides independent professional audit services on economic, efficient, and effective use of public resources, and the government demonstrates commitment by striving to implement audit recommendations. However, a critical procedural gap exists. Audit Reports require further National Assembly debates because the Audit Office statutorily reports to the National Assembly, necessitating forensic investigation by law enforcement working with the Ministry of Justice to build prosecutable evidence.
Audit Reports, in their original form, cannot serve as direct bases for criminal prosecution because audit rules fundamentally differ from prosecutorial laws. Criminal prosecution requires proof beyond reasonable doubt – a standard substantially different from audit opinion standards. Audit findings, while professionally sound, remain opinions subordinate in criminal prosecutions to evidence meeting prosecutorial thresholds.
This procedural reality does not diminish audit importance but highlights that corruption prosecution requires, among others, citizen-initiated complaints and evidence gathering – again placing primary responsibility on both institutions and citizens to report and resist corrupt practices they currently enable.
Evidence overwhelmingly demonstrates that the citizenry bear greater corruption responsibility than government because they initiate, sustain, and normalize corrupt practices. Citizens actively choose corruption as their preferred public institution interaction method, mentally conditioning officials to expect bribes as normal procedure.
The solution begins with citizens acknowledging their role in creating corrupt culture. They must stop offering bribes, seeking preferential treatment through corrupt means, and start demanding accountability from themselves before demanding it from officials.
The 2024 Corruption Perceptions Index shows The Gambia scoring 38 out of 100, reflecting not just official failure but also citizen failure. Every lost point represents countless individual citizen decisions choosing corruption over integrity, shortcuts over proper procedures, personal advantage over collective good.
Citizens created this crisis through individual choices and only citizens can solve it by changing behavior. Government anti-corruption efforts, including National Audit Office mechanisms and prosecutorial frameworks, will fail as long as citizens continue offering bribes and seeking corrupt advantages.
Citizens should be blamed more than the government for corruption because they are corruption’s primary architects, most dedicated practitioners, and most effective sustaining force. Until citizens accept responsibility and change behavior, corruption will strangle The Gambia’s development, regardless of political control.
‘Gambia Participates’ survey should be seen within proper context and that irrefutable fact remains thus: Gambian citizens are corruption’s victims and are also the architects of corruption.
Lastly, let me state clearly and emphatically that I do not mean to convey that there is no official corruption or that the fight against corruption has succeeded or meaningless. I do not also mean to convey justification for corruption or corrupt practices. What I seek to communicate is the bold message that the Gambian public and citizens must admit their active roles in the propagation of corruption; that if there is no giver, there will be no receiver to amount to corruption.; that because citizens are the givers, naturally takers were created. Further that although Gambians appear to publicly attack corruption and corrupt practices, yet privately many Gambians are comfortable participating in corruption. Unless this national hypocrisy is admitted and a serious willingness to confront corruption is embraced by all, the challenge shall persist. It is very critical to make this clarification so many will not jump impetuously.
