Which Country Is the Sleaziest?

Sept. 6, 2002 -- Michelle Sieff admits she and her bosses shared a few chuckles over the expense report for her last trip abroad.

Sieff, an analyst for the global consulting company Eurasia Group, traveled to Nigeria in April, where she had to take a flight from the capital, Abuja, to the port city of Lagos.

She and her colleague had fought through the crowds of touts and con men at the airport, and had finally arrived at the terminal, when an airport official approached them.

He told her to give him $50, or else there would be no guarantee their luggage would get on the plane. He said it very directly, very matter-of-factly, she recalled — like it was "a routinized process."

But the plane she and her colleague were about to board would have only eight people on it — making it unlikely her luggage would be lost.

Still, Sieff gave him the cash. After all, the airport official was engaging in what is a well-known cost of business in Nigeria, she said — the taking of dash, or bribe money.

The dash even went into her expense report, she said — and her bosses hardly blinked. "Fifty dollars, Nigeria bribes," she said, with a mix of incredulity and amusement.

"[The official] didn't give me a receipt," she joked, "but I'm sure if I asked, I could have gotten one."

A Widespread Problem

While the dash is notorious, Nigeria is far from the only country suffering from corruption. Visitors to Mexico are warned about the mordida, and those to Morocco are told to watch out for baksheesh, while Cameroon has its cadeaux and Bangladesh its gush.

Transparency International, a Berlin-based anti-graft watchdog group, recently released its annual Corruptions Perceptions Index, ranking 102 countries in order of their perceived level of corruption, with No. 1 being the least corrupt.

The last on the list was Bangladesh, but Nigeria was only one above, at No. 101. Cameroon came in at 89, while Mexico was a bit cleaner at 57, and Morocco was even better at 52.

In a year filled with corporate scandals and a stalling economy, the United States didn't even place in the top 10. It ranked 16th — placing it below the likes of Hong Kong, Switzerland, home of the secretive Swiss bank, and tightly controlled Singapore.

The United States came out only one spot ahead of Chile — a country that a little more than a decade ago was a military dictatorship.

Finland was No. 1, followed by Denmark, New Zealand and Iceland.

One Leads to Another

The laggards in the survey were some of the underdeveloped countries of the world.

The survey results also raise questions: Do underdeveloped nations breed corruption, or does corruption cause underdevelopment?

"It's more cause and effect," said Frank Vogl, vice chairman of the board of Transparency International.

"There is a close correlation between levels of freedom of information, strong democracy, human rights and lack of corruption and economic development," he said.

"Those that tend to have very young democracies, dictatorships, human-rights violations, tend to have high levels of corruption." Few press freedoms and limited access to information give the opportunity for officials to do deals and for the deals to stay secret, he said.

The TI index is used by multinational firms to determine risk and get a snapshot of the investment climate. But Vogl insisted that marking a country for corruption would not prevent it from receiving development opportunities.

One of the organization's founders, he said, was Olusegun Obasanjo — the president of Nigeria, who was elected three years ago under an anti-corruption campaign.

However, some people said such surveys also had to take cultural factors into consideration. "Some people defend bribery as the grease that keeps the system going," said Adem Carroll of the Islamic Circle of North America, a charity that does work in Bangladesh.

"Change is going to be gradual, because the system is in a way working for people. It's also stuck."

Sieff reacted with a similar ambivalence toward criticism of Nigeria. "I think corruption is a huge problem in Nigeria," she said. "However, people have learned to live with it. It doesn't prevent business from being done in Nigeria."

Finland’s Secret to Success

In contrast, this year marks the second consecutive time Finland topped the TI index. Its Scandinavian neighbors also placed near the top of the list. Denmark placed second, Sweden was No. 5, and Norway 12.

Scandinavian societies have a long tradition of openness. In the 18th century, King Gustavus III began a tradition under which Swedish citizens have the right to know what the bureaucracy is doing.

And that tradition, combined with a geographic isolation may have something to do with Finland's purity, said Kristiina Helenius, a press counselor at the Finnish Embassy in Washington.

"It's probably because Finland has always been geographically aside a little bit," she said.

Some countries in Central and Eastern Europe might have a reputation for corruption because they have more heterogeneous populations, which may have different definitions of a bribe, she said.

When asked about how she felt about Finland's achievement this year, Helenius herself showed how strong this tradition was.

Referring to her country's score in the survey instead of its rank, she said: "We are proud of it, of course, but it's 9.7. It's still not 10."