Welcome to the first episode of Patterns and Stories. Joining us today is Peter Eigen, the founder of Transparency International, a non-governmental organization fighting corruption with national chapters in over 100 countries. Peter founded Transparency in 1993, and before that, he worked at the World Bank. We will discuss the challenges of fighting corruption and what citizens can do about it.
We are your hosts, Luca Dellanna and Ismail Manik.
The transcript was lightly edited for grammar and fluency.
Highlights
“I wanted to set up a system where all the suppliers stop bribing simultaneously, and nobody would lose from that. I pushed this as a proposal within the World Bank, [...] and it didn't work at all because the countries which are the owners of the World Bank, like Germany, France, the UK, Japan, and so on, said you cannot get any business in the international market if you don't bribe.”
“Even the vice president for Africa said, yeah, we are going to do that. But he ran very quickly into the opposition of the owners of the World Bank, of the shareholders, who wanted their companies to continue to be allowed to bribe internationally. [...] I was not convinced anymore that it was really the corrupt African leaders who were demanding the bribes, but it was at least as much the corrupt suppliers who were offering the bribes from the North.”
“If you leave it to the government to control corruption, it will be very hard to be successful. [...] The better solution is if one gets together a civil society and organizes something like Amnesty International, Greenpeace, or Save The Children. This is where citizens get together to promote something that, to some extent, is supposed to help society as large but which the government is very often not able to supply. [...] It's important to get these citizen groups together and join them in a discourse with the government and the private sector in a given situation. And on that basis, you can change things.”
“[In Germany], until 1999, [companies bribing foreign governments] would get a tax write-off. They could declare this a useful expense.”
“We don't see ourselves as a transparency initiative, as an organization that chases individual corruption cases. We are doing that also if it is necessary for our mandate to change the system. But the main thing is we want to change the system.”
“There was one firm, the firm Bosch, know, the big electric firm, which lent us, for instance, their boardrooms for our sessions in Stuttgart, which supported our way. But they didn't want to mention this because they felt ashamed. They were embarrassed that they didn't bribe, you know, because the others, their competitors, thought they had to bribe because otherwise they wouldn't get contracts. So, it was very strange to build up a system of support.”
“We don't want to change the whole world from one day to the other, but we want to create certain situations, say, the road sector of Uganda or the health sector in Ghana or so. And we would say in that sector we try honesty, [and] we allow everything else to continue. We are not going to name and shame corrupt people. If you find out about it to the contrary, we try to become friends with the companies, in particular the multinational corporations. [...] Eventually, we convinced them through this integrity pact, which we eventually developed into a legal system where we would ask people who bid for a certain contract to enter into a triangular contract with civil society and with the government in which they promised not a single penny of corruption will be allowed in this contract. In particular, civil society was empowered to look at the books and so on, look at the bids, look at the bid evaluation. [...] We convinced various presidents to introduce the Integrity Pact in their bidding documents whenever they borrowed from the World Bank. But the World Bank didn't allow it.”
“One of the most important principles of Transparency International is that this has to be handled by the countries themselves and their people. And so, the main strength of Transparency International is the national chapters.”
“Our second mantra basically [is] that we have to get the main stakeholders together [civil society, the private sector, and the government] in a given situation with their interests and let them present their interests and confront them with their interests of the other two. [...] This multi-stakeholder process, which brings the three actors, government, civil society, and private sector together, has become sort of my golden key to better governance.”
“[Our third mantra is to] try to stay away from getting involved in individual cases of corruption too much. [...instead,] our organization should try to build a coherent, systemic approach to corruption. And I think we have shown that this can succeed.”
Full Transcript
Part I: the birth of Transparency International
Peter Eigen (00:36)
Thank you very much. It's a great honor for me to speak to you and Luca.
Indeed, it's been a long time since we met, but it's even longer since I started to feel very uncomfortable with what I saw in many of the World Bank projects.
I saw the decisions that were taken by governments that borrowed money from the World Bank in order to promote big projects, pipelines, railways, schools, hospitals, and so on. They very often made the wrong decisions, and we didn't quite understand why.
It became quite clear to me when I was still the division chief for some Latin American countries, such as Argentina, Chile, Peru, and so on, but even more when I became the director of the regional office in Kenya, that there were some arrangements made by the decision-makers in the borrowing countries with the suppliers to take the wrong offers – even when we told them this was too expensive, it was not the right thing to do right now to build a big highway. I have become more and more uncomfortable with the decision-making process in some of our borrowing countries.
Of course, I totally accepted that the governments who borrow from the World Bank, it's their business; it's the politics and the culture and so on of their country and the social needs which they have to take into account when they are taking the money of the World Bank. But we also wanted to see that our projects succeed, and therefore, it became quite a worry for me when I saw that very often projects were promoted, which we didn't quite understand.
And so I began to talk to suppliers from Germany, the United States, Japan, France, and the UK and I asked them. They said, well, in Africa, but also in Latin America and Asia, if you want to get contracts, you have to bribe people. And I said, well, but then they make wrong decisions.
I was in charge of the legal department many years ago, in 1967, when I joined the World Bank. I was in charge of the procurement guidelines, and international procurement was very much part of the gospel of the World Bank. So when we gave a loan of several hundred million dollars, and they were then contracted out to build big pipelines or railways or road systems, we wanted to get the biggest buck for the dollar, you know, and therefore, we followed very closely the competitive procedures and then the comparison of various offers. I understood more and more, and that was in 1988, 1989, and 1990 when I was in Kenya, that things couldn't be quite successful because the wrong decisions were taken and probably based on corruption.
So, I asked the World Bank basically to help me follow up on these rumors and stories of corruption. I asked the people who were building big projects in Kenya, Tanzania, Ethiopia, or any of these East African countries what happened. And they said, well, look, this is necessary. I mean, these ministers, these presidents, they demand it. And if you don't give them money, we don't get the contracts.
This is why I started to propose something (because I also thought it was a great shame that these wonderful companies were forced to bribe) to start some kind of a cartel of the honest.
Therefore, I called it the business practice monitor, and I wanted to set up a system where all the suppliers stop bribing simultaneously, and nobody would lose from that. I pushed this as a proposal within the World Bank, so as part of the World Bank's procurement guidelines, there was some self-fulfilling requirement that nobody pay any bribes.
And it didn't work at all because the countries which are the owners of the World Bank, like Germany, France, the UK, Japan, and so on, said you cannot get any business in the international market if you don't bribe.
And I said this is impossible. The Americans have the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. (In fact, unfortunately, the application of the Foreign Cross Practices Act in the United States was just suspended by President Trump.) So, this was for me the example. Jimmy Carter had started the Foreign Cross Practices Act, basically after the Watergate scandals, and made sure that no American citizen or American company was allowed to bribe abroad. And I must say this was a very courageous step. The companies didn't like it because they saw that the Germans, the French, and the Brits were allowed to continue to bribe. They had expected that everybody stopped at the same time. But others have said that it's good that Americans cannot bribe: then, it becomes easier for us to get contracts.
So, this was basically the situation that I found. Therefore, I wanted to start this business practice monitor, where every supplier who wants to bid for a World Bank contract had to commit that they all would simultaneously stop bribing. But this was not accepted by the Bank. And, of course, the Bank was very much under the influence of the countries that were the owners. The Americans would have loved to support me. However, Americans had only 15 % of the votes in the bank at the time. So the other countries like Germany had 6%, France 6%, Japan 6%, and many African countries had less than 1%. So, it was simply a decision of the bank that I was not allowed to introduce that system. And I was very unhappy.
I had a couple of friends in Kenya I met regularly, for instance, with a wonderful accountant whom I met once every week. His name was Joe Githongo, and he was one of the Kenyans who then started to work with me when we had a retreat in Swaziland with all the resident representatives of the World Bank in Africa. I was invited to give a speech to my colleagues, which I wrote together with Joe Githongo because I didn't want to pretend to give moral lessons to Africa, so I rather wanted to do that with an African friend. The two of us presented a paper, which everybody accepted. I mean, all the other resident representatives of the World Bank and other countries thought it was a great thing. Even the vice president for Africa said, yeah, we are going to do that. But he ran very quickly into the opposition of the owners of the World Bank, of the shareholders, who wanted their companies to continue to be allowed to bribe internationally.
So that became quite a fight. Within Germany, I had a couple of friends at the GTZ, as it was called at the time, which is the main technical assistance arm of the German development assistance. Their leadership was totally on my side, but the minister and also the government at large were totally against it. They said, we would lose our position as the world champions of exporters in Germany if we were not allowed to bribe anymore. And so, to make a long story short, I was asked by my management to either stop that, to go after the corruption, or I had to leave the bank.
I was very fortunate that I had just reached the time when I could retire. So I took retirement, and in 1991, I went to Berlin and called all my friends whom I had earlier discussed this matter with, including people in Latin America, but also in Africa, and about two years later, we had a big conference in which we set up Transparency International. I changed the name because I was not convinced anymore that it was really the corrupt African leaders who were demanding the bribes, but it was at least as much the corrupt suppliers who were offering the bribes from the North. So, to put the whole burden of reform on the people from the North [LDA: South?] would have been wrong. And therefore, basically, we called it Transparency International. There were other offers; some people wanted to call it Integrity International and other things, but I was able to prevail because transparency is such a wonderful term. It only describes something, the situation in which better governance happens, know, if transparency prevails.
So, that was basically the story at the time. I can go on and on, and it was a wonderful, wonderful story for me because I got a lot of support from many people all over the world. I mean, even at the launch meeting in Berlin in 1993, we already had a former Minister of Finance of Ecuador, and we had very powerful sector people joining us. I had Obasanjo there; he was the president of Nigeria, and at the time, he was running an NGO in Nigeria. So he came and helped us. It was a fantastic meeting that also combined a lot of international civil servants from the United Nations, Transparency International, Amnesty International, and other NGOs. So, at that time, we gradually formed the idea to set up Transparency International, and I must say I'm very proud that we managed to get it going.
Part II: Citizen action
Luca Dellanna (11:00)
What can normal citizens do if they want to reduce corruption in their country?
Peter Eigen (11:10)
I feel very strongly that if you leave it to the government to control corruption, it will be very hard to be successful. If you leave it to the companies, it's also very hard to succeed because the temptation to pay a little bribe and get hundreds of millions of dollars in contracts and so on is tremendous.
Therefore, you need other actors, and the individual citizens, of course, are not very powerful. I mean, if you are asked by a policeman in the street in Kenya or the Maldives, know, and he says, “I give you a ticket because you are parked wrongly,” and you say, “No, I'm not parked wrongly,” [and he replies,] “Yeah, but I think it looks very wrong what you park, but if you give me $10, then I can forget about it.” I mean, these situations are so easy, and the temptation to pay is great. And maybe it's the only solution. But the better solution is if one gets together a civil society and organizes something like Amnesty International, Greenpeace, or Save The Children. This is where citizens get together to promote something that, to some extent, is supposed to help society as large but which the government is very often not able to supply. Therefore, I'm a great believer in bringing together government, civil society, and the private sector to agree that, for instance, corruption is very damaging to everybody.
If there is corruption in the transport sector in Africa, all the transport companies that are trying to do business here will suffer from it. And so, in many ways, it's important to get these citizen groups together and join them in a discourse with the government and the private sector in a given situation. And on that basis, you can change things.
I mean, if you look back at Transparency International, for instance, in 1999, the legislation in Germany was changed. Basically, they now have a law, like the United States' Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, that says that a German company that is caught bribing somebody in Africa will be punished in Germany. In the past, until 1999, [companies bribing foreign governments] would get a tax write-off. They could declare this a useful expense, like Werbungskosten, as you say in Germany. And you would tell the Ministry of Finance had to pay $10 million to the president, so and so, in and such a country. And you can prove it, you show them the receipt, and then you could deduct that from the taxable income rather than being punished, you know. This is amazing.
So, how did we get there? I think it's a combination of a number of things. I mean, one which is very important to us [is that] we don't see ourselves as a transparency initiative, as an organization which is chasing individual corruption cases. We are doing that also if it is necessary for our mandate to change the system. But the main thing is we want to change the system.
And that's what happened in Germany. But it took a very long time. We had very close connections with a number of big companies. Many of them didn't want to be mentioned because they said we don't want to show off in front of the others who are bribing, but we are not bribing, and we support you. I mean, for instance, there was one firm, the firm Bosch, know, the big electric firm, which lent us, for instance, their boardrooms for our sessions in Stuttgart, which supported our way. But they didn't want to mention this because they felt ashamed. They were embarrassed that they didn't bribe, you know, because the others, their competitors, thought they had to bribe because otherwise they wouldn't get contracts. So, it was very strange to build up a system of support.
We were successful eventually with the government; we were successful with governmental institutions and development institutions. But it took very long, in the World Bank, to convince them. It took basically until Jim Wolfenson joined the World Bank – which was 1995. At that time, we saw a chance because we had heard that he was very much against corruption privately. And, in fact, it was a very nice story. He was a musician, and I played clarinet, and he played cello. And so he said, I'm coming to Bonn to talk to all the NGOs in Germany.
Ismail Manik (15:44)
I think he got an Olympic medal.
Peter Eigen (15:50)
Yeah, right.
I don't know whether you are interested in that story, but we basically convinced him that he should turn the World Bank into an anti-corruption agency. And that's what he did. It took us a couple of years. I had to basically commute back to the World Bank many, many times. And eventually, we got the World Bank to become one of the strongest agencies against corruption in the international area. So, Germany accepted this. I mean, the German vote in the World Bank, the 6 % voting power they had at the time, helped us. The Americans voted in favor of it. And very soon, the Brits and the French and so on joined. Eventually, the World Bank became a very strong partner in fighting corruption.
Ismail Manik (16:41)
I think Wolfensohn's speech, "Cancer of corruption," was a turning point for the World Bank. But I think your decision to leave earlier from the bank was also a very courageous decision. And what do you think was the tipping point that kind of moved this work to the forefront of anti-corruption efforts within the multilateral?
Part III: Changing the system, not fighting individual cases
Peter Eigen (17:10)
I think one of the best ideas we had briefly before the launch in 1993 was to create what we call the Integrity Pact. I mean, we call that also at the conference, we call that the island of integrity, where we said we don't want to change the whole world from one day to the other, but we want to create certain situations, say, the road sector of Uganda or the health sector in Ghana or so. And we would say in that sector we try honesty, [and] we allow everything else to continue. We are not going to name and shame corrupt people. If you find out about it to the contrary, we try to become friends with the companies, in particular the multinational corporations.
So, I worked very closely with Siemens, for instance. Siemens had its headquarters in Erlangen for a while. That's where I grew up. The then director general of Siemens was a close friend of mine, and we played tennis together and so on. So, we tried to become friends with the big companies. And we were friends with Bosch, but we found it very hard to become friends with Siemens. Eventually, we convinced them through this integrity pact, which we eventually developed into a legal system where we would ask people who bid for a certain contract to enter into a triangular contract with civil society and with the government in which they promised not a single penny of corruption will be allowed in this contract. In particular, civil society was empowered to look at the books and so on, look at the bids, look at the bid evaluation. And in fact, we introduced this in many, many countries.
Robert McNamara, who was the president of the World Bank for a long time, fell in love with that formula. So, he traveled with me to various African countries, and we convinced various presidents to introduce the Integrity Pact in their bidding documents whenever they borrowed from the World Bank. But the World Bank didn't allow it. In fact, they still felt that if you have free international bidding, you could not interfere. You couldn't impose any conditions. So you would have to allow whatever they do. In particular, you don't interfere with their politics; you don't interfere with their cultural system. So if, in a certain country, corruption is part of the deal, then the World Bank has no business in getting involved.
So, for a while, I had strong supporters like Obasanjo, like Jan Prong, who was a minister of the Netherlands, and so on. I eventually managed to introduce this integrity pact in many, many big contracts. I mean, even in Germany, for instance, our airport in Berlin had to be re-bid completely after about four years of preparations because they had a lot of corruption. And therefore, the managers of the suppliers came to us and said, “Why don't we introduce the integrity pact?” And we did. And now it's a wonderful airport here in Berlin.
So, this is one tool that we still use. For instance, in Pakistan, it's very widely used. And in many countries, we are trying to do this at every level. It can even be, say, in the school system, where you say the teachers agree with the parents and the students not to take bribes when they admit people to the school or something like that.
So it can be very small, it can be huge, you know. And I think the Integrity Pact has been one of the keys to getting the support of Germany, the UK, France, and so on.
Ismail Manik (20:56)
I think the World Bank is having, maybe starting yesterday, a major conference on anti-corruption. One of the keynotes was given by Daron Acemoglu, who talked about the link between institutions and efforts. Also, I think the World Bank has renamed the governance departments as institution departments. What would be your advice to the participants of this conference that is happening by major stakeholders on global multilateral efforts to address this issue from your experience?
Peter Eigen (21:36)
Well, I must say that one of the most important principles of Transparency International is that this has to be handled by the countries themselves and their people. And so, the main strength of Transparency International is the national chapters.
I mean, you have a fantastic national chapter in the Maldives. Italy has a strong chapter, too. In Germany, we have thousands of members in our chapter. Some of the chapters, like those in Bangladesh, have 12,000 supporters. In Argentina, they have 6,000 members and so on.
It's basically a massive people's movement of partly experts or partly also people who are suffering from corruption, either because they work in a big company where they have to bribe, I mean, they are told to bribe, you know, and if they don't bribe, they are fired, you know. Or people in governments who are used to taking bribes, and they're distributed to their superiors, and they have the same constraint. So, some systems are so corrupt that it's very hard to change things.
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Part IV: The Multi-Stakeholder Approach
Therefore, I believe very strongly in the second part, our second mantra basically, that we have to get the main stakeholders together in a given situation with their interests and let them present their interests and confront them with their interests of the other two. And that is civil society, the private sector, and the government.
So, when the government says, we have to do that, we need money, and so on because otherwise, we don't have enough income, so then they tell the others, then the others will say, but then you build hospitals which are crooked, or you build roads which nobody needs and so on. So we all suffer from that. And so all three stakeholders have their own ideas, their own needs, their own interests, and they have to be brought together, not only once for a meeting or so, for [the] integrity pact, but they have to stay together and look for a respectful and professional dialogue in which they compare these different interests and come to compromises.
That has become my main recommendation over the years. I mean, it's on the one hand that every country, every society has to develop its own fight against corruption. We should not try to handle that from Berlin, Rome, or somewhere else. And we should rather empower people in the countries. And that we can do [this] by supporting the movements of civil society and their freedom of acting.
On the other hand, if once we have that, we should then go for this multi-stakeholder process whenever it is possible. I mean, I'm still doing this right now. You know, when I left Transparency International, I started the Extractive Industry Transparency Initiative. And that is a typical example where the mining companies have the same voting power as the governments and the civil society organizations. So, in their charter, which is an association of Norwegian law that I helped to set up at the time, each of the three stakeholders has equal voting power. So, all their decisions, all their values, and all the positions they take internationally are carried out by a compromise of these three actors. And, of course, the mining companies want to make as much money as possible and do not want to have to clean up afterward, and so on. And they want to, if possible, hide their income so they don't have to pay too much taxes and so on and so on. And which is partly legitimate. But the civil society says, no, I mean, we live here in this village, we want to have a fair share of the income and so on. So, I mean, this multi-stakeholder process, which brings the three actors, government, civil society, and private sector together, has become sort of my golden key to better governance.
But of course, I mean, your question goes a little bit deeper. I mean, what do you do when everybody is corrupt? When your institution is corrupt, how can you, as an individual, make a contribution?
There, one simply has to be smart, you know, and try to develop a strategy that will eventually change things.
I mean, I was, for instance, we had a terrible thing with the UN Convention against Corruption to get that ratified in Germany. Because the deputies, the members of the Bundestag, said, look, if we assign that, if that is ratified in Germany, we cannot take any money anymore from our constituencies. We cannot talk to them. We cannot support their needs and so on. So, this makes it impossible to be an effective parliamentarian. So, they refused to ratify this. Germany was one of the last countries to ever ratify the UN Convention against Corruption, which was a fantastic achievement of the 160 countries that signed this in Merida, Mexico, with our support and our tremendous presence at the time.
A multi-stakeholder approach is, for me, the second most important issue.
The third one is to try to stay away from getting involved in individual cases of corruption too much. I mean, we had some problems with some chapters in Zimbabwe; for instance, they wanted to go after corrupt ministers and so on. And I said, don't do that. I mean, try to support if others are doing it. But our organization should try to build a coherent, systemic approach to corruption. And I think we have shown that this can succeed.
Luca Dellanna (27:33)
Peter, this approach is so important and so different from what other people would sometimes think. I'm sure that if you asked me a few years ago, I would have been like, oh, we should prosecute the individual cases, cannot work with them, completely the opposite. And I think it's so important now to hear about this, especially to hear that it worked.
On this, I was wondering if you think that this approach of working with parties that, at first sight, look adversarial, trying to find solutions where everyone is willing to work together, would also apply to contexts other than corruption. I'm thinking, for example, about some environmental issues or some other social issues. Do you know if there are other organizations in other fields that have started using the same approach?
Peter Eigen (28:23)
That is a very interesting question. In fact, I can tell you about a present effort which I'm making. I was part of Kofi Annan's Africa Progress Panel for 10 years. In 2017, we found out that about 600 million Africans don't have access to electricity. 600 million!
I mean, these are when the children come home from school, cannot, and the sun goes down, they don't see anything. They can't learn. The women cannot cook with electricity. They cook with charcoal, and the mortality of women in Africa is, therefore, much [higher] than everywhere else in the world. So 600 million people don't have a fridge, you know, where a health post can keep some medicines and so on. So he said, we have to do something about it. And so there are a lot of people who have good inventions in solar and other sustainable energy sources. But then there are others who have good ideas about how to invest and how to pay for decentralized electrification. But in many of the villages, the people don't really agree on what the rules should be if you have a decentralized energy source. And so what we are focusing on is to improve the enabling environment in villages in Senegal. [There are] 16 villages where the Senegalese have created, with our support, multi-stakeholder groups in which the local mayor, perhaps a local chief, perhaps some government officials, perhaps a sawmill owner who needs electricity, perhaps some kettle posts who need some electricity and so on, meet with civil society organizations in these villages and they discuss the rules of the game, you know, who is in charge of spare parts, we bring in a decentralized off-grid electricity solution, who takes care of the fees which have to be paid, how high do the fees have to be? Can they be higher than in the cities, when everybody just has to plug something into the wall, you know, and then they have electricity when they live near a line or so, and so on. In other words, we create multi-stakeholder groups in these villages, and they create a stable environment in which other people then begin to invest, basically, in off-grid electricity. This is happening in Senegal, and we are trying to expand this to other countries in Africa.
You may have heard that the new president of the World Bank, Ajay Banga, has promised that he will, until [by?] 2027, supply electricity to 400 million Africans. So, he is trying to do the big sort of World Bank-type thing. But I think he needs us because he needs to bring into the villages a government understanding of who will run this and what the rules will be so that you can attract private investments, for instance, in the villages.
I tried to use this in the fisheries sector. In Mauritania, we created a similar thing for local fisheries called the FiTI Fisheries Transparency Initiative. And it had its office in the Seychelles, run by Sven Biermann, who used to work for us here in Berlin. Basically, this has now quite a number of African coastal countries and Latin American countries to create governance, good governance through multi-stakeholder processes, where the fishermen say what they need, know, say what the government has to do, how they can avoid giving huge concessions agreements to, say, the Chinese fishing fleets or the Spanish fishing fleets which fish all the fish away. I mean, if you go to Senegal to the beach, you will see at the beach, you see one boat next to the other and the fishermen sitting around because they can't find any fish anymore. So, I mean, we have created this for fisheries. I've tried to do it for the Lieferketten, as we call it in Germany; this is a supply chain, for instance, in the garment industry. But, we didn't succeed with this because my concept of trying to create multi-stakeholder efforts in the producing countries was not followed by the German Ministry of Economic Cooperation. Instead, they forced importers, German importers, to only import if the production was fair and humane, you know, no child labor, no harassment of women, no slave labor, and so on. Of course, they are right; the Lieferkettengesetz in Germany was right, but it couldn't be enforced by simply telling a German importer that if you import something from Bangladesh, you have to make sure that there is no child labor in the factories and so on. I mean, for that, you need a multi-stakeholder process. So this is what my approach is in many other areas and others.
My wife does this in German cities, where there are fights about certain decisions on urban development and so on. She brings together civil society, the private sector, and the government to discuss what the best solution is. And in 10 cities here in Germany, she has found solutions for intractable problems through multi-stakeholder processes.
So I'm very much convinced of this, Ismail, and I'm trying to preach this, not so at TI, you know, whenever we were successful with Transparency International, it was based on multi-stakeholder processes. Whenever we were able to explain to everybody that it was in their interest to stop bribing, and then they agreed to simultaneously behave, we were successful in any context, whether it was in Asia, Latin America, Africa, or Europe.
Part V: The role of the academy
Ismail Manik (34:31)
One key stakeholder is the academic order. A lot of bureaucrats go to train in these public policy schools, such as LSE, Columbia, Harvard, or MPA. What do you think? I had a look at some of the course syllabi on how they teach corruption. What would be your suggestion? When you're training government bureaucrats and public policy students, what should be taught to them? What would be your syllabus in a sense? Key things that you would want them [to know] when they go back to their country.
Peter Eigen (35:08)
Yeah, well, again, this is a very good question, Ismail, because most people know that corruption is bad. And so, one must also teach them approaches to trying to create systems that make it very hard for corrupt people to indulge in corruption.
After I left TI, I taught at Harvard for two semesters myself, and some of the people who were in my classes became very powerful, and even some of the professors were affected by my work. So, this is a very important way of promoting the idea that corruption is not only bad but harmful and that there are ways of dealing with it.
And what you have sent me [in an email before this interview] as a teaching guideline is extremely interesting. These are very powerful tools that are being taught there. You also sent me something from Danny Kaufmann. I mean, he is extremely effective. He was at the EDI, at the Economic Development Institute, for a long time while I had left the bank, but we were extremely close because I also had been in charge of Chile for a long time. So, he set up a wonderful chapter in Chile. And we worked very, very closely. And in fact, he is still continuing his work. He's writing and speaking and so on, and very proud that he is still doing that. But it is something which should be perhaps also done by practitioners, know, I mean people like you who have worked in this field, they should convey what we learn, you know, in a given situation and what can be helpful. I think it is [a] very fragile good luck. In a society, if you are not corrupt, you know, we have seen many countries that were basically quite clean and were doing better in the corruption perception index, but also in this state capture index of Danny Kaufmann and so on. But then, suddenly, it all turns around again.
For us, for instance, Trump suspending the application of the Foreign Craft Practices Act is an amazing thing. I mean, we admired America that they had done that, even though they were suffering from it. I mean, General Electric and some of the big electronic companies were always complaining that the others were bribing and so on. And so we admired America for what they have done. And to just throw this out is such an amazing breach of decency and good governance. It's amazing. We are very concerned about that. But it shows how fragile it is. It also shows that you can change it.
I mean, in Germany, they are prosecuting quite a number of companies right now under something that is now similar to the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act in the United States. So it's basically the other way around. So, we used to admire the Americans. The French thought that we were more or less the lackeys of the CIA, you know, because we were introducing anti-corruption. We had to defend ourselves and say that we were independent. And now it's the other way around, you know. Now, our people in America have to be very careful that they will not be punished, you know.
So it's a very mixed feeling, and I'm sorry that I can't be more optimistic at this time.
Ismail Manik (38:40)
I think one thing from my personal experience, one thing that mattered, so when we joined the government, and there were our ministers when we joined, they were very good mentors, and they were people with remarkable integrity type of people have become kind of an endangered species these that are mentoring when somebody joins the public sector, that element is, I think, a very important factor.
Part VI: Individual Reflections
One final question I have: what keeps you waking up at night, and what advice would you give a young person who wants to study addressing these corruption issues and sometimes loses hope; what advice would you give to young people who want to be involved in this kind of work?
Peter Eigen (39:33)
Well, I mean, I'm a very fortunate person.
I had reached a point after 25 years of faithful work in the World Bank where I could leave with a slightly reduced pension. And so I did this, but I was still very young. I was 55. And so I wanted to use what I had learned in the bank and my energy and so on to do something useful. And, of course, Transparency International was something that was better than anything I could dream of.
And I still have an office at the International Secretariat. I don't have a secretary. In fact, whenever somebody wants me to do something, then they have to do the secretarial work for me. So I was sent to Mongolia, for instance, for two weeks. And so, everything had to be paid by TI. I talked to various ministers in Mongolia and wrote a long report, and I interacted with them on how to implement it. But then, unfortunately, the main counterpart, who was very good and was a minister of justice, became the mayor of the capital of Mongolia, so he had nothing to do with it anymore. Perhaps he still has something to do with it, but there was no real follow-up on my visit.
You know, it's beautiful for me. I met a lot of young and wonderful people like Ismail. A week ago, I was at the beach with my wife in Kenya, and we met a lot of people who knew us. And it's a wonderful thing, you know. But also, of course, it is something that is really an obligation of somebody who has so much learned, has such a big network, has so many possibilities of speaking up, and so on. So this is why this is all very exciting. By the way, also for my wife, who's, as you may know, also politically very active. She was a presidential candidate in Germany twice, and to my great delight, she lost. Otherwise, I would be the first lady right now. [Laughs.]
Part VII: Technology
Ismail Manik (41:41)
And one final thing, I mean, we have to talk about technology, how it's changing. What is your view? How can we use it? Is it an opportunity in the age of AI, and do you think it is empowering things? It gives more agency, I guess, to those who are fighting corruption. What are your thoughts on this?
Peter Eigen (42:01)
Absolutely. Unfortunately, it is also a very good tool for corrupt people. So, I mean, they can shift billions of dollars within seconds around from one capital mark to the other, and so on. So, the anti-corruption community has to be very good at artificial intelligence, as much as we have to be good at all the other tools and weapons that we have against crime and destruction in society.
So, I'm personally probably too old to get too much mileage out of it. I was always very much interested when I was the director of the World Bank office in Nairobi. I was one of the first to interact with the headquarters with this kind of stuff, you know, give up the telegrams you used to send back and forth. Right now, I'm not really completely up to date with artificial intelligence, but I hope that our younger colleagues who are fighting corruption follow that very closely and fight very hard for better governance with these new tools.
Conclusions
Luca Dellanna (43:24)
Thank you so much, Peter. I really loved this because I found your example so inspiring, and it’s also inspiring that it's possible to bring people together. I've learned so much about the multi-stakeholder approach. It's so different from what you hear a lot of people proposing, but it's effective. And for me, that's the number one takeaway from today, that it's less about focusing on individual cases and more about trying to change the system in a way in which everyone is willing to change it. So, thank you so much. I've just learned so much, and I'm so impressed with you and with Transparency International.
Peter Eigen (44:02)
I want to thank you for giving me such a wonderful possibility to spread the word all around the world.
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