By Nicolette Makovicky and Jörg Wiegratz

Faced with rampant fraud and corruption, government and civic actors in Slovakia and Uganda have in response turned to appeals to discourses of public ethics, and personal responsibility, and patriotism rather than addressing issues of political economy and power.

Governments and NGOs across the world have recently started using a range of unorthodox methods to encourage the public to participate in the fight against private and public-sector fraud[1]. These include launching digital tools and phone lines for anonymous whistleblowing[2], lotteries which help citizens to report instances of tax evasion[3], and even reality TV shows which celebrate honest government officials[4]. Rather than targeting the perpetrators of fraud, or reforming inadequate processes of oversight and regulation, these initiatives aim to recruit citizens to fight malpractice. They use a mix of entertainment, financial rewards, and appeals to morality, citizenship, and national pride to incentivize populations to detect and contain fraud in private and public life. In this way, they transfer part of the responsibility for fighting fraud from the state and/or business to the citizen, extending the process of fraud detection and sanction to everyday activities such as shopping, picking up a prescription, watching television, or gossiping with neighbours.

Beyond their distinctiveness and novelty, these measures are interesting in several ways – we highlight two of them here.

First, there is the particular context in which these measures arise and proliferate: neoliberal capitalism. Neoliberal societies are characterised by high-intensity fraud and corruption across economic sectors, the state, and society[5]. In ‘adjusted’ regions such as East Africa and Eastern Europe, frequent news about corruption and fraud scandals among elites and non-elites alike is matched in countries such as Uganda and Slovakia by campaigns to fight ‘vice’ and clean up the economy and polity. Such ‘virtue campaigns’ form part of a larger government- and/or civil society-led anti-corruption, anti-fraud, anti-money laundering policies[6]. These campaigns present the fight against fraud as a joint effort between state and society, calling on social actors – from businesses to religious institutions, to NGOs and citizen-consumers– to stop and reverse the ‘moral decline’ which ostensibly drives rampant economic wrong-doing. This discourse of moral decay (and decadence) is also popular amongst third sector anti-fraud campaigners, public commentators and journalists, who regularly portray business, politics, and society as having ‘lost’ its moral compass, leading to a corrosion of public trust and the rule of law[7].

In Slovakia, for example, there have been repeated calls for a return to slušnosť – a term which can be translated as ‘civility’ or ‘decency’ – in the wake of the murder of the investigative journalist Jan Kučiak in 2018[8]. Kučiak’s work revealed unprecedented levels of state capture, tax avoidance, embezzlement and fraud amongst the Slovak elite, including their collusion with members of the Sicilian mafia. After his death, liberal civic activists, conservative centrists, and far-right, anti-system groups were united in a call for a return of ‘decency’ into public and political life. The term became a touchstone for both activists and politicians espousing universal democratic values, and populist calls for the protection of the public from predatory elites. Slušnosť has since become a fixture in the language of Slovak politics, as well as major anti-corruption campaigns. As recently as April 2023, the Slovak President Zuzanna Čaputová told the audience at the anti-corruption festival ‘Pucung’ that she ‘believed that decency could still win’ [9].

This leads us to our second point. Underpinned by a rhetoric of moral deficiency, citizen-directed anti-fraud initiatives are not only meant to recruit citizens to address dishonesty and malpractice. They are also designed to produce ‘virtuous’ citizens: efficient public administrators, good taxpayers, and active whistleblowers who internalize and act on prescribed norms in a demonstration of ethical citizenship. ‘Virtue campaigns’ thus aim to promote ‘integrity’ amongst corporate subjects, public officials, and the general public, understood as ‘the consistent alignment of, and adherence to, shared ethical values, principles and norms for upholding and prioritising the public interest over private interests’ (OECD 2017). Emphasizing that fraud is harmful to economic and social development, to wealth creation, and to the welfare of the individual and the collective, civic activists, aid agencies, and officials thus suggest the primary weapon against fraud is a demonstration of honesty.

Such calls for integrity are often accompanied by what we call ‘accountability patriotism’ – that is, the requirement that citizens regard themselves as co-managers of public life and resources. In Uganda, for example, posts and posters disseminated across social media and public space encourage citizens to report counterfeit products and to pay (rather than evade) their taxes. They are told that such acts of good citizenship can contribute to financing the country’s health, education, and infrastructure systems[10]. Government officials regularly explain widespread corruption in the public service as the result of a ‘lack of patriotism’, and present the production of a generation of patriotic Ugandans as a chief ingredient for tackling corruption. The government has launched a substantial programme of patriotism training for schools, universities, and employees at state-run institutions; coordinated by the state administration (with the National Secretariat for Patriotism Clubs in the Office of the President), and promoted and implemented to a significant extent by the army,[11]. This patriotism campaign remains highly contested, critics claiming that the government cannot instil patriotism in this way, especially when officials are in the news daily for de-facto unpatriotic behaviour.

While scholars debate the effectiveness of fighting fraud and corruption through citizen engagement, there has been less academic discussion of their ethical implications and political effects. We argue that studying such anti-fraud programmes and ‘virtue campaigns’ can tell us much about contemporary capitalism as a moral-economic project, order, and practice. Examining the social construction of virtue in the face of fraudulent behaviour by both powerful and subaltern actors can shed light on the role of morality in social negotiations about the distribution of economic benefit and harm across populations. It can also provide insights about the way honesty is demanded and mobilized by states and NGO/aid actors, and how matters of ‘good’ corporate and public governance are turned into questions about personal integrity. Furthermore, paying attention to the language and practices of anti-fraud campaigns can tell us a lot about the way in which market affairs, activities and practices – and the creation of wealth in particular – are moralised under neoliberalism. On the surface, they look much like other public campaigns, in that they promote a particular set of values and norms, and demand norm adherence amongst their target audience. What sets them apart is their discursive emphasis on moral excellence – that is, their demand that actors of different kinds (bureaucrats, citizens, corporations, policymakers etc.) not merely follow the rules, but develop a virtuous character as the basis for moral action in economic, political, and social life.

Nicolette Makovicky is Programme Director and Lecturer at Russian and East European Studies at the Oxford School of Global and Area Studies, University of Oxford. 

Jörg Wiegratz is a Lecturer in Political Economy of Global Development at the School of Politics and International Studies, University of Leeds, and Senior Research Associate, Department of Sociology, University of Johannesburg. He is currently guest researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology (Halle/Saale), Department ‘Anthropology of Economic Experimentation’.

Notes:

[1] https://theconversation.com/no-country-for-dirty-money-behind-britains-populist-promise-on-corruption-45398; https://theconversation.com/the-fight-against-economic-fraud-how-african-countries-are-tackling-the-challenge-161432

[2] http://ipaidabribe.com; https://www.independent.co.ug/fight-against-fakes-campaign-launched-in-elgon-region/

[3] https://abovethelaw.com/2019/10/in-some-countries-your-receipt-can-be-a-winning-lottery-ticket-and-can-help-the-government-collect-sales-tax/

[4] http://www.integrityidol.org

[5] https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781783488551/Neoliberal-Moral-Economy-Capitalism-Socio-Cultural-Change-and-Fraud-in-Uganda ; https://www.berghahnbooks.com/title/CarrierEconomy; https://www.routledge.com/Neoliberalism-and-the-Moral-Economy-of-Fraud/Whyte-Wiegratz/p/book/9781138058057.

[6] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1367549408091844; https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-031-19224-1

[7] https://theconversation.com/bankers-have-a-moral-compass-it-just-may-not-look-like-yours-38118 ; https://observer.ug/viewpoint/62418-god-morality-and-uganda-s-development-model; https://www.monitor.co.ug/uganda/oped/commentary/moral-decay-diagnosis-of-causes-in-uganda-urgent-1712224; https://chimpreports.com/moral-decay-among-individuals-blamed-for-increased-corruption-poor-service-delivery/; https://nilepost.co.ug/2022/05/24/opinion-moral-collapse-responsible-for-ugandas-sorry-state/; https://parliamentwatch.ug/news-amp-updates/surging-moral-decadence-worries-parliament/ .

[8] https://www.anthropology-news.org/articles/common-decency-in-the-populist-era/

[9] https://dnesky.sk/prezidentka-caputova-verim-ze-slusnost-stale-smie-vyhrat-video/

[10] https://www.facebook.com/URApage/photos/a.209886415690079/2976316775713682/?type=3

[11] https://op.go.ug/patriotism; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ptc81gzA4Qs; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3qLl1pIsG5Y; https://www.newvision.co.ug/category/news/over-5500-undergo-patriotism-training-in-kamu-157847.