“To give real service you must add something which cannot be bought or measured with money, and that is sincerity and integrity” – Douglas Adams
Governments around the world have been entering into more and more partnerships with private businesses under the guise of providing a better life to their citizens even with the limited resources available for public service. Citizens usually see and hear about success stories of such public-private partnerships (PPPs) mainly due to timely completions of projects with tangible outcomes and the propaganda used by both public and private entities involved in those.
Even though PPP became popular around the world recently, it has existed from the beginning of governing structures. PPP, as we know it today, is just one such collaboration where public sector decision makers enter into a contract with one or more partners from the private sector to provide the infrastructure or goods and services to the citizens of the country.
This process is known as the ‘Alternative Service Delivery (ASD)’ in more general terms where the concept of the government has also been reinvented to facilitate such measures. What started as partnerships in mega construction projects such as highway systems, air and sea ports and subsidised housing for low-income people have expanded now to almost all the areas of services such as education, health, agriculture, waste management, environmental conservation, prison operations and even conducting wars. Governments justify by promising a more efficient allocation of resources giving a better ‘value for money’ for the tax payer while the private sector can make good profits while enjoying all the tax benefits and other perks negotiated in the contract. Profit made can be reinvested helping the growth of the economy of the country. This is what is expected from the PPPs in a perfect world.
Integrity
Unfortunately the world is not perfect and human beings involved in the negotiations of such PPPs, more often than not, have no idea what integrity means. Participants from the private sector should not be blamed for negotiating for an optimum profit they should get for fair play and transparent negotiations. Public sector participants, relevant officials and decision making political bodies should take the responsibility of implementing all the rules and regulations providing equal opportunity for all interested and qualified bidders and they should not be looking for any personal gains through such negotiations. It is ironic that the countries that can benefit the most by properly implemented PPPs, due to lack of funds and resources available to the state, are also the ones known to be full of corruption due to extreme selfish behaviour of the negotiators involved from both public and the private sector.
Usually when the average citizen comes to know about any type of corruption in such a partnership they automatically put the blame on the state officials or the politicians. But, it takes two to tangle. Therefore, if one sees corruption in a PPP then there is at least one person from each side involved in it. If a politician is asking for a bribe to offer the contract for a project then the private organisation willing to pay the highest bribe will win the contract.
There are government officials who would pass on the confidential information to a particular bidder for a small fee. All such activities can fall under the category of collusion within the regulatory framework.
This is very common in the markets where insider trading has almost become the norm and not the exception. Industry espionage is rampant all over the world. Spying on the competitors’ secrets to get ahead and or to steal the technology has become one of the most needed aspects of the competition. Countries like the US accept bribery and call it ‘lobbying’.
Some multinationals have highly paid full-time lobbyists working for them whose job is to wine and dine lawmakers in Washington DC and find out their weak points so that they can influence (or blackmail) them to support certain pieces of legislation favouring the company or the industry.
Interest
There are countries where the majority of the prisons are built, owned and run by private companies where the state pays the company based on the number of inmates. Needless to say then that it is in the company’s best interest to keep the facility at the maximum occupancy level which is unofficially guaranteed by the state.
There are private companies to supply soldiers to fight wars for other countries. If there is a war somewhere in the world then there are a whole lot of industries and individuals making profit out of that war, not just by manufacturing and selling arms but even by selling people to wear a uniform for some other country and fight against people from a third country. When there is a war somewhere there will be refugees fleeing that country migrating to neighbouring countries. There are private companies in those countries that get the contract to catch and incarcerate illegal immigrants. All these can easily be categorised as public-private partnerships. It is not easy to find out where some of these cycles start, that is whether the war started first or the companies and the prisons were built first and then the war was needed to create business.
Elections of public officials and lawmakers are no longer about the candidates and policies but about the money they can spend on buying the media power in the process of brainwashing the voter. Nobel Prize winning economist Prof. Paul Krugman once said: ‘Follow the money. Never mind what privatisation or PPPs do to state budgets; think instead of what it does for both the campaign coffers and the personal finances of politicians and their friends. Are the corporations capturing the politicians or the politicians capturing the corporations? Does it really matter?’
The writer has served in the higher education sector as an academic for over twenty years in the USA and fourteen years in Sri Lanka and can be contacted at [email protected])