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184 Diagnosing Corruption in Ethiopia
• Other types of bribes are uncommon (though some would disagree)
and relatively small, and political intervention appears to be decreasing
(though some informants contend that political loyalty has reemerged
as an important consideration in personnel actions).
• The most common form of corruption involves bribes solicited by or
offered to police to ignore a criminal offense, not make an arrest, or not
bring witnesses or suspects to court (which can cause a provisional
adjournment of the case). Traffic police are the worst offenders.
• A second reputedly common form of corruption—payment of court
staff to misplace case files or evidence—has nearly disappeared
because of new judicial policies on archive management introduced
under a Canadian International Development Agency program (FJA
2005).
• Although no one denied their existence, study participants disagreed
about the frequency of (a) sales of judgments or other judicial actions
in civil disputes; (b) lawyers’ solicitation of “bribes” that never reached
the bench; (c) prosecutors’ misuse of their own powers, in response to
bribes or political directives, to advance or paralyze a case; and (d) the
corrupt actions of various officials entrusted with enforcement of judgments,
especially in civil cases.
• The lack of consensus and the likely gap between perceptions and
reality are partly a function of the persistent lack of transparency in
personnel policies and the focus of sector modernization programs on
other objectives (such as efficiency and increasing access). Internal
mechanisms (complaints and disciplinary offices) also suffer weaknesses,
and sensitivity about corruption (in this and other sectors) may
be discouraging agencies from attacking it more directly and openly.
Overview of Recommendations
Both to decrease the perception-reality gap and to attack the problems
that really exist, the following actions are recommended (in addition to
more study on procurement and budgeting issues and institutions
[traditional mechanisms, social and sharia courts] not covered here):
• Greater accessibility and transparency. The agencies’ complaint-handling
and disciplinary offices as well as the anticorruption commissions
should become more accessible (through decentralization and morepredictable
hours). They also need better databases on their own actions
and should consider publicizing their reasons for not pursuing vaguely
presented complaints.