The Corruption Cure: How Citizens & Leaders Can Combat Graft

by Robert I. Rotberg,
The Huffington Post, May 30, 2017

Corruption has been – and continues to be – a permanent feature of public life. As have efforts to cure it. Towns in medieval England weighed public officials before assembled crowds, with excess avoirdupois deemed to be a measure of greed and graft. In 1730, in the British House of Commons, Sir Robert Walpole asked whether it was “a crime to get great estates by great office” – and answered his own question: “What else could anyone expect?” More recently, UN Secretary General Kofi Annan deemed corruption “an insidious plague,” especially destructive to developing countries and poor people.