AfricaPress-Tanzania: A WISEMAN will always tell you that the biggest disease in mankind is corruption and its only known cure and vaccine is transparency.
If you don’t believe in that then switch to United States President, Joe Biden’s school of thought: “Corruption is a cancer, a cancer that eats away at a citizen’s faith in democracy, diminishes the instinct for innovation and creativity.”
The list might be long on why corruption is an enemy of the people, an enemy of development with a Nobel Prize laureate, Rigoberta Menchú crowning it all that: “Without strong watchdog institutions, impunity becomes the very foundation upon which systems of corruption are built. And if impunity is not demolished, all efforts to bring an end to corruption are in vain.”
That is the exact world every Tanzanian wants, the people want a government that is allergic to corruption and a government that faces head-on the corrupt and wrestles them to the ground.
On the breath, yesterday the sixth President Samia Suluhu Hassan deserves praise for further telling the Controller and Auditor General (CAG) not to mince words and the Prevention and Combating of Corruption Bureau (PCCB) to bravely fight corruption with all its ‘mild’ and baptized names of kickbacks and clandestine payments in corridors.
It is worth praise to leaders in public offices who give corrupt practices no time, while emulating the late President John Magufuli’s style of leadership of calling a spade a spade and not a big spoon, where truth and justice must be said.
From the top to the bottom, no corrupt individual was spared in the slaughter and crusade of weeding out crooks and their syndicates in the system and this is the kind of transparency Tanzanians want.
These are the officers driving latest car models, building classic apartments in cities and putting up castles in rural areas despite lower salaries, setting a bad precedence to the students in schools and newly employed people that to be employed in a public institution is simply to devise a means of stealing with a pen.
We can not have a country where, contractors are demanding payments and getting paid for works never attempted or done below specifications, hence, the only language to be spoken with these people is to subject them to lifestyle audit, retire or even jail the incorrigibly ones, then revenue collection would shoot up.
Surely, if corruption is taken for granted and baptized with all sorts of fancy names, taxes will not be paid, the poor will not get justice and only few well connected people will reap, where they did not sow.
