
How to corrupt safely
As many as 41 of 45 Malang city council members have been detained by KPK for alleged bribery case. I’m not surprised as most people might have been since we are in competitive bribery era. But I very am surprised by how slow the politicians adapt to this environment. They could’ve been less barbaric to avoid KPK radars.
In competitive bribery, everyone wants to maximize the corruption payoffs, taking as much bribes as possible from the agents. No one cares about how it might hurt the economic growth. In fact, if the bribery acts finally hurt the voters as it usually does, for example because of higher subsidies they should have received, politicians need to bribe them more to get the votes for maintaining power. In turn more corruption payoffs will be demanded by the greedy politicians, hurting the economy all over again. We can call it the competitive bribery vicious circle.
But with KPK in the game, such a barbaric yet uncoordinated actions will be easily sniffed. Those council members compete fiercely to each other and most importantly there’s no respective leader to distribute the grafts quietly. Imagine when the middleman must negotiate to each of council members over the bribe money. Good luck with the delivery as KPK is already behind their back before they even know it.
There should be a trusted leader to conduct a safer bribery game. The graft amount and how they split among them, the delivery system or the exit strategy should be set up from the beginning of every term. Of course in this game everyone receives less bribes than what they might get in competitive game.
But it’s hard to imagine for such a game to happen especially if you see how political parties compete these days. It’s not cheap to compete fiercely like that. But maybe that’s the very reason why those councils took bribes in the first place, to support the mightier competition.