Democratized Corruption

UB Post

November 23, 2010

The capital accumulation, an economic basis for capitalist system, is taking place in Mongolia. Only when a huge capital is centralized in hands of particular companies, it is possible to make remarkable investment to develop projects.

The government duty is to build a favorable fair-competition environment for private companies and on the other hand to make infrastructure investment through taxes and other levies.

Unfortunately, in today’s Mongolia, the government serves as a tool to make some group of people get richer and richer instead of fulfilling the above duties, further deviating the business principles and its normal operation instead of building favorable conditions for businesses, which led to disappearance of fair and free competition. Finally, ordinary businessmen “buy” their favorable business conditions by corruption. Though the corruption has been spreading in Mongolia and in our northern neighbor, it is different in terms of their concept.

In Russia, the corruption is feudalizing. There, a few number oligarchs has built close links with authorities and became an extraordinary social class, who machinates with authorities to sell Russia’s rich natural resources and who outbids to buy the world’s most expensive real estates. Meanwhile, ordinary citizens of Russia remain poor. However, because Russians can see and sort out who creates and spreads corruption, they have possibilities to clear out and get rid of them under a certain historical conditions.

In case of Mongolia, the corruption is democratizing. The corruption has penetrated deep into every branch of our social life, becoming a basic survival condition for ordinary citizens. All businesses, no matter big or small, are being fed by corruption.

In order to win a tender bid, which is machinated by decision makers, citizens and individuals race with each other to give bribe in each decision making levels. Ordinary citizens fight each other to have even little connection to any part of mineral resources development. A main reason why the corruption is democratizing in Mongolia faster than its society is that every person began to see the corruption as an only opportunity or only approach available to get or acquire what he wants. As the corruption serves as basic conditions for the existence of society in Mongolia, chances to clear out and get rid of corruption system have been disappearing.

If it continues at current speed, we will soon be among the countries, where the corruption is more democratized than society, where authorities in power get richer and richer while ordinary citizens get poorer and poorer. Economic branches are politically and economically controlled by leaders of machinated political parties in power, under such fancy names as coalition or consensus. Meantime, most of population is gradually getting poorer, increasing the number of people isolated from the society.

So far, one generation that only the minority benefit from quality or international standard education is behind us and the power of government is now passing to inherits of those who ruled the country for the past two decades. In a normally developing country, the income of population grows at relatively same speeds and order to ensure it there must be a real political opposition party in the government. In Mongolia, only few people rule and control the whole country and do whatever they want, under the name of coalition or consensus.

On the name of the state, they threat, rob and shoot to death its citizens. It is getting more likely that soon there will be no one left to say against the words ordered by them. Those who are believed to be smart, intelligent, just and wealthy, go abroad in exodus for various reasons and started to purchase real estates in the country, to which they go. In order to stop this sorrowful trend, first we need a strong political opposition party.

Secondly, we need the involvement of well-informed and intellectual citizens capable to affect decision making. In other words, we lack a strong civil society. These two factors are major guarantees for democratizing the society faster than the corruption.

Translated by P.Shinebayar