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507
5.8
5.9
A Government officer's attitude towards corruption would be conuitioned by his personal expectations, and by what was expected of him by his family and by his colleagues. The pressures put upon him by the expectations of others and his, only natural, personal wish to better himself in both financial and social terms made him vulnerable to corruption. Once an officer had embarkod upon a corrupt course, his dependence upon other corrupt officers became even more significant and his attitude towards corruption was rationalised in his own mind. this situation, the one factor which would have lod individuals to doubt the error of their ways and their rationalisation of their personal involvement, would have been the strong possibility that the corrupt officer and his comrades would eventually be exposed. That possibility was virtually non-existent until recent years.
The Breakdown of Accountability
In
The important question is why was the possibility of detection virtually non-existent. One major factor was that, until recent years, the law relating to corruption contained weaknesses and the detection machinery was not sufficiently well equipped to deal with widespread and sophisticated forms of corruption. As syndicated corruption became more widespread, there must have been many ways in which its existence, or at least strong suspicion of its existence, should have come to light. There could be many possible explanations. It could be that some senior officers wore personally involved, some could have been misled by their junior officers, some could have grossly under-estimated the size of the problem or refused to acknowledge its widespread existence, confining themselves to dealing with the cases of corruption that came to light as incidences of a few rotten apples" in an otherwise unsullied barrel.
The Rotten Apples" Theory
The possibility that senior cfficers in the past could have thought or sought to perpetuate the view that corruption was restricted to a few "retten apples" is particularly worthy of examination. Senior officers could have subscribed to this view simply because acceptance that corruption was widespread would have been seen as a collective slur on the integrity of their staff and a highly adverse reflection on the public image of their department and on their own effectiveness. Perhaps it is only human nature that people should be reluctant to admit faults if their existence reflected badly on themselves. Loyalty to one's profession, to one's staff and one's supervisors is a commendable quality, but too often it leads to a reluctance to accept criticism in any form. For example, professional officers may be highly critical of their colleague's work in private, but may be reluctant to admit laymen to their confidence. development of this exclusive attitude has been that professional qualifications have been presented as a guarantee both of skill and of absolute integrity in employment of that skill. Similarly, administrators and managers have tended to treat any criticism of their organisation as an imputation of personal inadequacies (which it may have been).
A
G.F. 323
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