| Chapter 1: | Corruption and Circumstantial Evidence |
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To capture the magnitude of corruption in economic terms, Alan Bacarese revealed that corruption represents 25 percent of the world’s costs on government procurement. The Corruption Perception Index (CPI) for 2006 for Transparency International (TI) reflected that, of the US$4 trillion spent on government procurement annually, approximately US$400 billion will be siphoned off in corruption, classically in the form of bribes. Corruption is the cause of building unnecessary infrastructure that is of dangerously poor quality.39 In 2004 the World Bank announced that over US$1 trillion were paid in bribes in one year alone.40 In 2007 Bacarese contended that the figure was then five to six years out of date and did not represent the cost of large-scale fraud or embezzlement of public funds. From the African angle, the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission in Nigeria put the country’s own corruption and theft at approximately £210 billion, or US$420 billion.41
The Poverty Reduction Strategy, together with the Tanzania Development Vision 2025, sets out the strategy and objectives for poverty eradication by 2010. To realise these objectives, the government came up with the medium-term strategy for poverty reduction (PSRP) that was developed in 2000 and seeks to reduce the incidence of absolute poverty from 48 percent to 42 percent by 2005, and down to 24 percent by 2010. The current GDP growth increased from 4.1 percent in 1998 to 7.1 percent in 2007. Agriculture, the backbone of the economy, is targeted to grow at 5+ percent per year. The government has also prioritised basic education, primary health care, water, roads, the judiciary, agriculture, and HIV/AIDS in its Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper (PRSP).42
These economic growth endeavours by the government can only be successful if corruption is tackled comprehensively and in a multifaceted approach, because it makes serious inroads into any meaningful economic, political, and social development in a country—more so in a poor country. This book is another attempt to demonstrate that corruption can be tackled from many fronts, including through the utility of circumstantial evidence in corruption cases to complement other prongs against the malaise.