CORRUPTION-YEMEN: MPs to Fight Rising Menace

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Nabil Sultan

SANA'A, Jan 5 2006 (IPS) - A group of members of parliament have formed a new group to fight growing corruption.

The group, the ‘Yemeni MPs Against Corruption’ plans to work with international organisations and similar groups in other Arab countries in an attempt to bring administration in line with United Nations anti-corruption standards.

Yemen was placed the second least transparent country in the Arab world after Iraq in the last Transparency International report. The Human Development Report for last year said corruption is the most serious challenge before the government in Yemen.

Faisal Abu Ras, MP for the ruling General Peoples Congress quit membership of the World Bank network group within parliament over the failure of parliament to tackle corruption.

“The absence of transparency and the ignorance of the executive and legislative authorities are the main reasons for the corruption crisis in Yemen,” he told IPS. Parliament, he said, had failed to safeguard public interests from a “government of mass destruction.”

The new group plans to promote the role of the Yemeni parliament in fighting corruption. A meeting called by the World Bank last month declared that Arab governments need clear strategies for fighting corruption.

Beyond a parliamentary committee the World Bank has proposed setting up a national committee that brings together various organisations that could together fight corruption.

Yemen has lost large amounts of foreign aid because of its feeble anti-corruption programme, Mohammed al-Taib, member of the Shura Council, the upper body of the parliament said at the World Bank meeting.

The World Bank has slashed 200 million dollars in aid because the Yemeni government was not seen to introduce needed reforms to fight corruption.

President Ali Abdullah Saleh has simply denied corruption within his government. “Those who raise anti-corruption slogans are themselves corrupt,” Saleh said in a recent statement.

Few believe what the President said. “The country suffers from a corruption flu that is spreading rapidly from one institution to another,” said Abdul-Bari al-Doghaishi, MP.

The ruling party had established the Central Organisation for Controlling and Auditing (COCA) several years ago to inquire into corrupt organs of the government.

“But not a single official has been punished for financial corruption so far, despite reports by COCA revealing serious financial corruption in state-run organs,” secretary-general of the group of opposition parties Mohammed al-Raboei told IPS.

The ruling party has said that it will create a new authority to fight corruption. But in the face of the experience with COCA, and Saleh’s declaration that there is no corruption, most people expect little from such a body.

Civil society members say that combating corruption would do much to eliminate poverty and unemployment, and to improve trade and investment opportunities. Corruption is seen as a major factor inhibiting foreign investment.

More than 40 percent of the people of Yemen live below the poverty line, itself set at a low level of subsistence.

Corruption and the collapse of institutions that it is causing could make Yemen a failed state, says a report by the Belfer Centre for Science and International Affairs at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.

“The economic crisis will get to a point where the regime loses legitimacy, and there could be civil war or anarchy,” says an expert quoted in the study.

Another expert held out the dubious hope that apart from oil there are not that many contracts to get kickbacks from, and therefore “there’s not that much to steal.”