Hacking Corruption

2015 Monrovia, Liberia, Anti-Corruption Billboard

Corruption is Networked

Liberia demonstrates many incremental successes since climbing from the bottom of international corruption rankings following decades of conflict. Successful navigation of the Liberian working environment requires an empathetic reality check to understand, ethically operate, and influence change.

While the clichés of shady characters in dark offices accepting brown paper bags of cash do exist, a clear view of its endemic corruption requires a look at the ground-reality at corruption’s lowest echelons. Recognizing countries of vital to US foreign policy interest like Somalia, Afghanistan, and Sudan still hold the bottom rungs of the rankings, Liberia offers a great test-case as a nation in transparency recovery.

In our work in Liberia, we’ve encountered a wide swath of ethical challenges as small groups and even individuals exploit vulnerabilities and chokepoints: government offices delay needed documents, hospital workers pad out invoices, contractors take a loose view of their contracts, and police checkpoints often serve little function other than to extort small bribes.

Poverty Causes Corruption that Causes Poverty

At the lowest levels, unethical behavior often comes from true desperate need: workers with low and unreliable salaries, victims of war, and former child soldiers etc.

It’s easy in a developed country to think of corruption as an individual secret sin, but experiences in Liberia show that a strong driver of pilferage, embezzlement, and extortion is the heavy family and community responsibilities that fall on the small percentage of Liberians lucky enough to be steadily employed. Even the most honest of employed Liberian laborers soon find themselves the target of heavy demands borne out of serious need: “Even the best workers and government employees can easily find themselves in a position where they can either cheat their bosses or clients or, through principled inaction, harm their loved ones.”

Compounding this is the principle “it’s expensive to be poor.” An initial lack of funds creates a cascading effect of greater and greater expenses: inability to maintain vehicles or homes leads to urgent repairs, inability to pay debts promptly leads to costly interest and penalties, inability to pay for preventative medicine leads to expensive medical emergencies. The net result is that the deeply poor cannot afford to take the otherwise prudent measures that would head off later expenses.

Finally, Liberia’s unstable history and educational shortcomings result in entrenched poor financial habits and discourage forward thinking, even if a worker later finds themselves in a position that makes stability possible. One employee came to us for an advance since she couldn’t afford her son’s transportation to school. When we sat down with her to work out a budget, it turned out her job with us paid significantly more than her prior job, but since her last job paid weekly she was able to set aside money for each week’s transport, but when receiving a larger salary once a month, the pressure of other obligations would routinely drain her savings even weeks before the next monthly payday.

As an American company operating in Liberia, we have many disadvantages in managing employees trapped in cyclical poverty, and it’s difficult to emphasize the importance of transparency and ethical business without coming across as self-serving, demanding that employees and suppliers conform to “our rules” and compromise their own security by foregoing the chance to cajole more money out of the system. Routinely confronting these uncomfortable situations led us to come up with several key company policies to shape a more transparent and ethical working environment.

Set the Conditions for Ethical Behavior

A key strength for us is being consciously aware of the poverty and social pressures that drive unethical behavior at the lowest levels. Among our expat staff, we emphasize to each other that even the decisions that vex us most are, on some level, based on a pragmatic personal decision. As one expat employee told our CEO: “none of these people are actively trying to hurt you, they’re just trying to take care of their own people first.”

Local Staff are Vital to Understanding

Our local staff, including our accountant, lead engineer, and always-vital “fixer” are an invaluable key to understanding the Liberian context. Especially when our tempers are strained to the breaking point and we have a burning desire to rain down negativity on whatever local power is blocking our progress. Our local staff is with us to provide an explanation of the motives behind what seems to be just malicious interference. The issue cuts both ways, when we’re able to put foreign organization’s concerns and seemingly irrational actions into context for our Liberian colleagues, ironing out the cultural clashes inherent in the job. Serving as mutual sounding boards makes both sides stronger, and when one side can understand a formerly “foreign” problem, it makes it that much easier to design the solution.

Blaming Up

Though it can be an uncomfortable technique, “blaming up” can be an important deconfliction tool. Putting the responsibility for unpalatable decisions onto a higher amorphous Other is completely counter-intuitive to the military veterans in our organization, who come from a context where you’re obligated to internalize and own the values of those above you. But in a development environment where personal relationships are key and social and geographic distances huge, sharing a personal vexation with “what I have to do” can create a mutual empathy and sense of being in a shared difficult situation.

One place this technique is a regular winner is during extortion by police or immigrations authorities, civil servants who are almost literally underpaid with the expectation that they to make up the difference. We don’t want to pay bribes for a wide variety of reasons, both out of principle, the risks to ourselves, risks to other development workers if we allow ourselves to be seen as human piggy banks, and of course the fact that handing out cash left and right is not a winning financial strategy.

To hold the line against petty extortion, but creating fellowship instead of antagonism, and very importantly giving the extorter a chance to save face and feel gracious, sometimes we just lay it on thick: “my man, I know it’s hard working out here on the checkpoint and I know a little pocket money helps, but my boss lady, if she catches me paying pocket money I get sacked. And if she doesn’t sack me and the funder finds out, we lose the contract and we all lose our jobs. If it was just me, I would give you some small money, no problem, because I know you’re a good guy and working hard, but I can’t risk getting sacked. People like you and me, we got to do anything we can to keep our jobs.”

Pre-emptive Media

Our company hosted the Huffington Post film crew for “Now What with Ryan Duffy” to film a documentary. Advertising the filming of the project proved a powerful tool in creating excitement and curbing unethical behavior. Nobody wanted to be the one who held up a good news story and international attention over trying to wring out another five dollars for “additional fees,” knowing the whole community would blame them if their misbehavior somehow made it into the show.

We feel we were able to tweak the media’s traditional post-facto corruption-shaming spotlight into an ethical behavior enabler — a pre-emptive threat of transparency that kept local authorities minding their appearance.

Unfortunately, the Huffington Post won’t be there to film every one of our projects, but we can recreate the same effect on a smaller level by maintaining a strong social media wing, and demonstrating a commitment to documenting both the good and bad of our experience.

Creativity and Verbal Judo

At the core of our anti-corruption strategy is a dedication to deconfliction and to an almost game-like encouragement of creativity, combined into the art of Verbal Judo. After months of butting our heads against a wall getting in arguments at every shakedown, threats to call higher ranking police officers to punish them, calls to our fixer to run over and solve the problem, or Hollywood-esque feats to evade checkpoints and lose cops, we finally concluded that just being smart and talking our way through it was the easiest solution, and a fun challenge.

Key to setting up the “game” is going into a confrontation with the goal that everyone comes out happy, and with the Verbal Judo truism “if it feels good, don’t do it.” Calling a cop a corrupt bastard or telling an interference-running office clerk that you’ll report them might feel satisfying, but it just sets up an adversarial relationship where now your opponent is bound by honor to find some way to hurt you back, to save face. Backing someone into a corner just makes them come right at you, instead you want to leave them an opening a mile wide… that just happens to lead them right to somewhere good for you. Money is a good thing people want, but more often than not, especially when money doesn’t look to be forthcoming, people will fall back on “winning” respect or recognition to save face. Any cop that hassles us, we’ll find something good that he’s doing to praise; we’re happy to 100% agree that we shouldn’t have turned right on that red, and that we fully agree that foreigners aren’t immune to the laws and we respect them for pulling us over. We won’t pay money, however overextending ourselves in praise, cooperation and relationship building allows the checkpoint cop a graceful exit from his money getting attempt.

Corruption has a lot of faces, from the large-scale of a million-dollar contract being held up pending one politician’s signature, to the car registration renewal that can take “either five minutes or five days” depending on the citizen’s “generosity.” At whatever scale, simply not perpetuating the cycle of expected graft is a key way that development workers can set a tone for social change. It’s almost always easier to pay bribes, and coming from a purely utilitarian perspective it would probably be far cheaper in the short run, but on the most basic level paying bribes is just another slice of complicity a social ill that keeps Liberia back from its full potential.

2015 Monrovia, Liberia, Anti-Corruption Billboard