Regulating Unregulated Corruption in Ethiopia: Private and Religious Sectors under a Glance

Abstract

As corruption is a big concern of every society in the world, nations have been exerting utmost effort to combat, if possible, or at least to minimize its prevalence. Such efforts of controlling corruption necessarily involves preventive and corrective measures, such as enhancing ethics amongst the individual members of the society and prosecuting individuals who have been found involved in such acts. Those preventive and corrective measures are often taken by states in the public sectors only in exclusion of other sections, such as religious institutions and private sectors. This trend, however, has allegedly affected effectiveness of states’ anticorruption efforts as corrupt behaviors and acts in those social institutions go unregulated; thereby providing fertile ground for prevalence of corruption in those sects that later can intrude into public sect. Understanding this, some international and regional anticorruption instruments tend to advise state parties to deal with private sect corruption. As a result, countries have started to extend anticorruption hands to crucial area of private sectors, good example being the recent Ethiopian anticorruption proclamation that has extended state’s anti-corruption hand to some institutions in the private sectors. The proclamation, however, excludes all religious institutions and some of a private sector from the ambit of the state regulation, allegedly affecting the state’s plan of combating corruption. Accordingly, this paper, through doctrinal legal research method combined with some empirical considerations, tries to articulate problems associated with unregulated corruption and also tries to justify a state intervention in unregulated area.