So this is something that gets brought up at school, usually in lectures about corruption. The narrative goes that corruption becomes more likely every time a leader is elected and so long tenured leaders are prone to corruption. So an African billionaire (they don’t mention he has British citizenship in my experience) set up a $5M prize to give to African leaders for being good. It has been highlighted that this is a major anti corruption initiative because it encourages leaders to not stay too long in office and thus limit corruption.
However to me this smells like a sham. A billionaire rewarding people for a lack of corruption and promoting good governance sounds like corruption. It sounds like interference with government, with the democratic process that libs tirelessly espouse, as well as a healthy side of reputation laundering.
There is never much discussion on if this has been found to actually help at all but there is definitely no discussion on if this is actually part of the problem, or if $5M is even enough to insentivise anti corruption, nor is there much nuance when it comes to the whole “long term leaders are corrupt” narrative.
Absolute and total bs. It’s like Jon Stewart giving bullshit awards to azov battalion for “fighting for democracy”. This is something to be given to countries who (for however long they’re in office) subdue popular uprisings and keep whatever country totally open to western industrial and finance capital.
Also, regarding the argument of long term leaders being more corrupt- if it was true we would see that in real life. The proof is in the pudding, and there’s none. The most corrupt country in Europe? Ukraine post USSR. In reality corruption all comes down to the political and economic system. Countries like the US have frequent presidential elections but the corruption is so insanely bad that it’s literally legal and all out in the open, and the masses of people can’t do shit about it but complain. Corruption will exist throughout all of history as long as there are hierarchical systems of power. It’s just about reducing it and massively punishing it to the point where it’s fairly insignificant. If we look at China for example, Mao was the top of the party longer than any others and China wasn’t nearly as corrupt then as it was in say the 90s and early 2000s. The more liberal the economic system the more it will lend towards and reward corruption.
