Batswana �happy� with corruption levels - survey
Tefo Pheage | Wednesday December 2, 2015 18:00
Released yesterday, the survey gathered views from 43,138 respondents over seven months last year, with 1,200 in Botswana alone.
More than half of the respondents said they were satisfied with government’s efforts to fight corruption.
According to the survey, most Batswana responded “no” when asked whether they had to pay a bribe, give a gift, or provide a favour for services ranging from courts, police, household services, documents/permits, public school services and public clinics or hospitals.
“The results show that all six services are comparatively clean in Botswana, Burkina Faso, Cape Verde, Lesotho, Mauritius, Namibia, Niger, Senegal and Swaziland, when compared with the regional averages,” the report states.
“On the other hand, bribery is reported as rampant across all of the public services in Cameroon, Ghana, Guinea, Liberia, Nigeria, and Sierra Leone, where all the services have much higher bribery rates than the regional average,” reads the report.
Researchers found that the levels of bribery, as reported by respondents in Botswana, were on par with low bribery rate countries on other continents such as in Europe or the USA.
Batswana also reported being positive that they could make a difference in the fight against corruption, being some of the few citizens on a continent where others feel helpless.
According to the survey, 72 percent of respondents felt that ordinary citizens could make a difference in fighting corruption, compared to 42 percent in Zimbabwe and just 39 percent in Sierra Leone.
“Citizens across the continent clearly differ in how serious they deem the extent of the corruption challenge to be, with those in Botswana, Lesotho, Senegal and Burkina Faso giving more positive responses about the state of corruption in their country, while those in Sierra Leone, Nigeria, Liberia, and Ghana holding deeply negative views,” researchers found.
However, the report found that most respondents felt that corruption in Botswana had increased moderately over the past 12 months, while researchers also found interesting responses when they asked Batswana which politicians they felt were corrupt. According to the responses, 20 percent of respondents think the president could be corrupt, while 25 percent think MPs are corrupt and 29 think government officials are corrupt.
The highest percentages are reserved for the police, whom 34 percent think are corrupt and business executives, whom the respondents feel 35 percent are corrupt.