More thoughts on corruption

In 2004 I got a check in the mail for $13.86. This was pretty unusual for me, who up till this time had only ever received info mailers from colleges and the occasional birthday card. The check was not the oddest thing I've ever gotten in the mail. That would be a razor from the US Army which delivered on my 18th birthday. Attached to the razor was a note saying, “Congratulations, you're a man now,” and a mail-in form to register with the draft board. But I'm getting sidetracked. Apart from the razor, the check was the weirdest thing I had ever received in the mail.

The check was part of a class-action lawsuit I was party to. It was the only class-action case I have been a part of. The suit alleged that the music industry forced retailers to fix higher prices for CDs and penalized them for going under the recommended retail price. These were the days when you would be expected to drop $18 dollars for a CD, and our AOL dial-up connection at home was too slow for Napster to work, so you had to play by their rules. After 3.48 million people signed up for the lawsuit, we each took home a whopping 13 bucks. What did I do when I got the check? I cashed it and bought a CD.

Why did I buy a CD instead of pocketing the money or using it for gas or slurpees or baseball cards or something else? Well, because at the end of day I just really want a new CD and was tired of waiting by the radio and hitting the record button on my tape deck every time a song came on the radio. 

OK, I'm obviously dating myself a little here. Some people reading this never saw the days the days of sitting by the radio waiting to record your favorite song as it came on. Others rejoiced when tape recorders were made available because they could record their LPs onto cassette and put them in their Sony Walkman to take wherever they wanted. Others yet know only of a time dominated by filesharing and playing music on demand from youtube or other places.

The point is as much as I complained back in the day about high CD prices and having no other alternative to getting my music, the fact was that you just shut up and paid 18 dollars because you needed to have not only Speakerboxxx but also The Love Below—I've made countless other purchases but mentioning them would only embarrass me as they haven't stood the test of time. Sometimes, $18 for a CD is just the price you pay to play the game.

And with that, allow me to talk about corruption.

The example of my class-action CD may be a little stretched. There were no riots in the streets in the early part of the last decade over CD prices. Me and the millions of others that got our $13.86 did not put our feet down, draw a line in the sand, and refuse to partake in a rigged system of strong-arming and over-charging. We just kept paying our money and listening to music because there were no (legal) alternatives. I know that nowadays people talk about artists losing millions due to filesharing, but consider the fact there are also more albums being made my more artists year after year in the digital age of "unprofitability" in the music world.

But I'm getting sidetracked. Lets take this back to my post yesterday about corruption. Not to sound defeatist, but many, many, many times in cases of corruption you, the citizen, just have to put up or shut up. Mozambicans have shown the last decades an incredible tolerance for corruption. It is denounced when found and hated in every corner of the country, but rarely does anger reach critical mass needed for policy-changing action. Mozambique has shown a desire to march (read: riot) but those have been in the occasions of raising the prices of bread or bus fares, never because parliament gave themselves a raise, elections were rigged, children undeservedly failed school, neighborhoods were deprived of water and electricity, nepotism, favors, and so forth.

The situations I've personally encountered can't really be mentioned for the sake of privacy, but I usually face two extremes when dealing with people. The first will be that people I come into contact with are so accommodating and helpful because they recognize that I am in Nampula working at an orphanage helping those who otherwise have no voice. There is a great amount of respect for that and they don't complicate things for me or in some cases move me to the front of the line, figuratively speaking. On the other end of the spectrum they assume that, though I may work at an orphanage, my main purpose in Mozambique is to earn money (if they only knew...) and therefore they want a cut of it. Sometime it's something as innocent as a bottle of coke, other times its several hundred dollars.

Several of the kids that have left the orphanage and gone out have come back and asked for a loan because they are trying to get a job and need a bribe in order to get it. There have been other cases where after getting a job they has been pressured by bosses to commit or look the other way from illegal actions or risk being fired for speaking up. Or after getting hired, their direct superior will try to extort bribes from them in exchange for preferential treatment or commendations.

The challenge that I face on my own, and in advising and supporting the kids, is to have a consistent moral ethic and to never draw a line and say, "A coke is OK, or up to ten dollars is OK, or up to $50 because it is something really important." There are some people I know that feel that bribing is OK, all though they usually refer to it as something like "greasing the wheels" or "opening doors". I think if their conscience allows them that, then who am I to say no. But for me, I also have the responsibility of projecting a set of values to the kids here. A bribe opens a revolving door that cycles the expectation of favors or gifts. It may take longer to get your documents or licenses, continue through police checkpoints, get a desired job—often complicating matters is the fact that the choice is not between two different jobs, but having and not having a job—but is it worth it to suffer righteously? That is the question I ask of myself and ask the kids to ask of themselves.