If you were appointed to run a public institution that is corruption-ridden and delivering very poor services, how will you go about turning that institution around?
Is there a process you can follow to ensure you get the right results in as short a time as possible? Are there steps that will ensure visible, deliberate and desirable outcomes that your customers (the public) and your staff (public servants) can support and celebrate?
When faced with corruption, we are often tempted to dive in and punish everyone who is going wrong in a bid to make an example of some and send a message to others. But if corruption is really endemic in that organization, it is unlikely to stop that easily and one may end up battling on many fronts and being undermined by many in such a way that services might even go worse at some point. It can then become extremely difficult to achieve the primary objective of running effective public services.
There is a different way. But to appreciate it, it is best to start by defining corruption as a deviation from a standard in order to deliver illegal personal benefit. This quickly illustrates two sides to corruption; the service or standard aspect and the illegality aspect. When we jump in to fight corruption, we often attack the illegality and the people perpetrating it but a smarter approach is to address the standards because without the service there can be no corruption.
Conniving employees must put a name to a service before they can successfully use it to siphon funds. So, if you fix the service, you will fix the deviation and the corruption, at the root.
But even when you focus on service standards though, there will still be people who are so invested in the corrupt way that they will be ready to go to great lengths to fight reforms and keep the illegality in place. Such people can also be handled systematically.
To address this holistically, I proposed the ARIMP process in my book, “The Survival Mindset: A Systematic Approach to Combating Corruption in Nigeria” which is to:
- Arrest the situation.
- Restore service standards.
- Initiate new policies.
- Migrate existing transactions.
- Protect service standards.
The first two steps deal with the service end of the problem, the second two steps deal with the people end and the last one holds everything in place to ensure continuous improvement and a robust feedback system that can identify deviations and fix them early.
