Of all the startling executive orders announced in the last few months, why does halting the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act scare me the most?
This is why.
It was a Sunday morning in Tanzania, we were on our way to church, and we needed gas. We pulled our rickety white van into the nearest station (which were always full-service) while Gil and I fished around for cash (which was always the only payment option).
Gil only had 50,000 shillings, which he passed to the gas station attendant. As the attendant filled the tank, I triumphantly rustled up another 30,000 shillings from the depths of my purse. “Aha! We can top up now!” I declared.
I rolled down my window. “Please add another 30,000,” I called in Swahili to the attendant.
Oddly, instead of adding extra gas to our tank, the gas station attendant pulled a large wad of receipts from his pocket. He sifted through them and handed me an old, wrinkled receipt for 80,000 shillings.
I sat there for a moment, totally flummoxed, until it dawned on me. The attendant had misunderstood me. He didn’t realize I was asking for 30,000 shillings of extra gas; he thought I wanted a receipt for 30,000 shillings more than we had paid.
Why would the gas station attendant make that assumption and then nonchalantly comply? Because people in Dar es Salaam who are wealthy enough to own cars often hire drivers. The drivers run their errands and, of course, fill the car up with gas. And if a driver can produce an inflated receipt to his employer, he gets some extra cash on the side.
So when customers left their receipts behind, the gas station attendants collected them, ready to dutifully pass them on to pilfering drivers. If I had wanted a false receipt, all I needed to do was ask. Embezzlement was that easy.
As a naïve American living in Tanzania, corruption always surprised me, and my belligerent responses seemed to surprise Tanzanians. I remember standing at a counter in a furniture shop, finalizing my order, and the clerk telling me that if I wanted a receipt, I would have to pay an extra 20 percent over her originally quoted price. Twenty percent is Tanzanian sales tax.
I loudly and angrily proclaimed, “Yes, I want a receipt. Yes, I will pay tax. It should have been included in the original quote. I want to pay legally.” The first time this happened, I vowed never to use that business again. Until I realized that this philosophy meant I’d have nowhere to do business.
I remember a friend who owned a graphic design business telling me, in despair, that in order to attract any customers, she had to give the option to avoid tax and pay under the table.
I can’t count the number of times in Tanzania that I was pulled over by police for made-up offences. Often I could talk my way out of tickets once they realized I was not willing to pay a bribe, but not always. One time, an officer insisted I pay a fine (in cash, of course), but he had no ticket book. I refused to pay. We finally agreed that he would take my driver’s license as collateral while I drove to the police station to pay legitimately and get a ticket. I drove to three stations until I found one with a ticket book. The officers there laughed at me. “Why didn’t you just pay the officer?” they said as they wrote me a ticket.
So as I read about the new executive order in the United States that halts the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, I thought of all of these scenarios. The act’s original aim was straightforward: “Stop US citizens and companies from bribing foreign governments. It was the first law in the world to penalize severely (up to 20 years imprisonment) bribery of officials in foreign countries.”
I didn’t know this act existed until this week, but now that I do, I’m alarmed it’s been halted. This law is indispensable.
Why? Because during my years overseas, I became increasingly convinced that the number one reason developing countries were still “developing” was because of corruption. It wasn’t because of lack of resources. It wasn’t because of a lack of a hard-working population. Corruption was always the common denominator.
I don’t want to give the impression that I’m picking on Tanzania. Many countries are as corrupt or more corrupt than Tanzania. I’ve written about corruption in the international adoption world in Uganda and linked to the story about Zambian leaders selling Christmas shoeboxes. The book Behind the Beautiful Forevers profoundly impacted me, showing me the connection between poverty and corruption in India.
Corruption begins a vicious downward spiral. When it becomes the norm, it ruins entire nations. I can’t say this strongly enough.
For example: When Congolese government officials accept bribes from Chinese mining companies in Congo, the money from natural resources goes into their pockets instead of infrastructure. So there’s no money to pay teachers. The teachers, in order to feed their families, require each child who enters their classrooms to pay a “tip” each day. Sometimes they require the children to pay a bribe just to pass their exams.
This means that most Congolese children simply can’t afford school – even public school. So they go to work in the cobalt mines. Probably every lithium battery is tainted by Congolese child labor that originated in government corruption with foreign companies.
Certainly the FCPA has prevented American companies from diving straight into the cesspool of African mining themselves. Now that the safeguard is gone, how much more blood of Congolese children will be on American hands? How much more worldwide poverty will be directly correlated with American wealth?
I once declared that to be virtuous is a luxury of the rich. This is a generalization, of course, since I know many non-rich people who are virtuous. In fact, I know of several in Tanzania who have stood up against corruption under the weight of unbelievable personal sacrifice. But the reality is that when the rich and powerful are corrupt, it becomes extraordinarily difficult for everyone else to live life with integrity.
It’s pretty hard to pull yourself up by your bootstraps when the bootstraps must be purchased with a bribe.
For societies to flourish, the richest and most powerful people must choose integrity. And since the United States is the richest and most powerful nation in the earth’s history, our nation’s responsibility is weighty indeed. Under-the-table deals among the international elite will have implications for the gas station attendants, the graphic designers, the teachers, and the children of the world.
But this isn’t just about caring about what happens in other countries. It’s about caring about our own country too. When bribery is permissible – even expected – at the top levels of authority, the rich get richer, the poor get poorer, and a system of distrust permeates every relationship. When greed takes precedence over justice, over compassion, over friendships, life deteriorates for everyone.
My Tanzanian former students, educated within a biblical worldview and now trying to make life and business work in Africa, have often lamented to me how challenging it is to maintain their values – and their friendships – in an environment infused with corruption.
And this is why every American should be distressed that FCPA no longer regulates corruption.
“Evangelicals on both the right and the left supported FCPA. More than two dozen antibribery Bible verses bulwarked their views. Ecclesiastes 7:7, one of the most succinct, says, “A bribe corrupts the heart.”
Some advocates of the act also offered a financial rationale: that a strict prohibition on bribery requests from foreign governments would help shield companies from the pressure to dole out bribery fees. Opponents complained that US companies would lose some business to competitors from other countries that could offer bribes, but FCPA cosponsor Rep. John Moss countered, “That is the small price we must pay to return morality to corporate practice.”
The Trump administration is updating the position of those opponents from almost a half century ago. Minimizing bribery to “routine business practices in other nations,” the executive order argues FCPA has been “overexpansive” in enforcement “actively harm[ing] American economic competitiveness.
The executive order shelves “any new FCPA investigations or enforcement actions”—including what might be a bribery-facilitated, multibillion-dollar renewable energy scheme.”
But maybe Americans shouldn’t be surprised, because perhaps the problem runs deeper. What if revoking the FCPA is just a symptom of the cancer of corruption that has already infected American life? While the values of integrity and honesty used to be foundational assumptions in the United States, I’m not so sure they are anymore. In Gil’s current Worldview classes, he asks his high school students – who are from Christian families – how many would steal $1000 if they knew they could get away with it. Or how many of them have cheated on homework in the last month. Routinely, all but one or two raise their hands.
This is where we must start.
* Images by Willfried Wende and cmfg804 from Pixabay
Kim William
Wow!