December 9 marks the International Anti-Corruption Day. Each country needs to evaluate its efforts to combat corruption and to discuss the outcomes. Because corruption and bad governance are the biggest obstacles for a country’s success and contributors to increasing poverty. Although Mongolians are increasingly feeling its effects and civil society is demanding to put an end to corruption with a unified voice, there is not much progress. It’s the people who always pay the cost of corruption; no wonder one-third of Mongolians are impoverished, and three-quarters still use pit latrines. In Transparency International’s Corruption Perception Index, Mongolia ranked 93rd out of 180 countries in 2018 and 106th in 2019.
Main cause
Like other democracies, our state consists of trias politica – legislative, executive, and judicial divisions. These three institutions must work independently from each other, each with their own power and responsibilities in a balanced way and must answer to one another while respecting human rights, freedom, and justice.
However, that is not the case in our country. Corruption is particularly rampant due to the audit and judicial institutions becoming subservient, which are supposed to ensure justice. Major corruption cases remain unsolved, criminals go unpunished, and trillions of tugriks in damages caused by corruption are not repaid, causing frustration in society and losing public confidence in the fight against corruption.
The risk of corruption is pushing foreign investors away, failing businesses, and destroying competitiveness. As the state involvement in the economy grows, enormous public assets are unchecked, and few individuals take advantage of them in the name of the party. In terms of budget and procurement, there is a lack of initiative and leadership from the Ministry of Finance, the Government Agency for Policy Coordination on State Property and Procurement, as well as audit organizations.
Corruption has become a daily part of our society. Civil service runs on bribes. Sixty percent of the respondents in a public survey on corruption said they paid bribes when facing the bureaucracy.
The website of the Ministry of Justice and Home Affairs is www.mojha.gov.mn. The whole situation will be different if every civil servant of the agencies and bodies affiliated with the ministry goes to work every morning with the mindset of “establishing justice in our country.” Those agencies and bodies include the ministry itself, the National Police Agency, the General Authority for Border Protection, the General Executive Agency of Court Decision, the Intellectual Property Office, the General Authority for State Registration, the General Archival Authority, the Mongolia Immigration Agency, the National Institute of Forensic Science, the University of Internal Affairs, the National Legal Institute, the Legal Aid Center, and the General Hospital for Civil Servants. Moreover, the results of any work depend on individual attitudes. In many countries, such as the United States and India, the equivalent of such ministry is named the Department of Justice.
What needs to be done?
First and foremost, there is a need to bolster the IAAC (Independent Authority Against Corruption) and enhance the anti-corruption legal environment. The National Anti-Corruption Program has to be implemented on a wide scale, and a specialized anti-corruption court needs to be established. Rigid adherence to the principle of punishing the corrupt and mandating full compensation is needed everywhere.
Fighting corruption is not only the job of the IAAC. Leadership and practical effort are missing from senior officials in ensuring that their work is corruption-free and that the sectors and units they manage are transparent, accountable, and fair. While the IAAC detects and investigates corruption, it is the responsibility of civil servants at government levels to work with integrity. It will be their leadership, role-modeling, and legacy if tasking, day-to-day oversight, and monitoring are done properly.
State-owned companies need to be turned into publicly owned companies under the monitoring of shareholders. If the current ‘Law on Administrative and Territorial Divisions and Their Administration’ is adopted, soums and districts will have the power to set their own tax amounts and prepare their own budgets. Consequently, many locally owned companies would emerge, necessitating good corporate governance from the outset.
The time has come for us to end party-based appointments in the civil service, start appointing civil servants based on skills, and have a retraining and promotion system. There is also a need for legislation on the transparency of funding of political parties, which are the principal source of corruption. However, with their potential profits in mind, Mongolians defend the parties and groups they belong to and the networks they work for, by claiming that a politician is being defamed or that it is unfair to investigate a politician with big achievements for minor violations. This makes it difficult to tell if people are on the corrupt’s side or anti-corruption fighters’.
Mongolia only has electoral democracy, but a democracy with citizen participation, control, and consensus at all levels of public governance needs to be instituted between elections. The last 20 years have shown us: corruption will never be reduced solely by changing the law, developing various programs, and creating slogans. It is time to educate and enlighten an entire generation that says no to corruption. Justice is the foundation of a society.
2020.12.17
Trans. by Riya.T and Munkh-Erdene.D