We have always been dodgy and fraudulent at times. But I had absolutely no idea this could be so bad. Its so bad that after seeing this I inadvertently searched for fake moustaches. Guess whose country had just been given an ignominious 115 out of 180 by Transparency International on the 2008 Corruption Perception Index. Things were bad enough in 2007 when we were ranked 84. But 115 this year – that’s way below countries like Mali, Djibouti and Rwanda!
Meanwhile, even on the IFC/World Bank’s Doing Business Index we slid one notch to 69th place in 2008.
I don’t see anyone in our media talking about this. Maybe we found this to be so utterly shameful that we as a nation collectively decided to repudiate the issue. President Nasheed, in the meantime, is keeping himself busy with plans to open more banks in the Maldives and is working hard to attract investments into the country. His State Minister for Economic Development working with the newly created Invest Maldives has announced plans to embark upon an ambitious programme to attract FDI. I don’t see a country ranked at 115 by Transparency International making much headway with attracting FDI from legitimate bona fide businesses. A good reason why Singapore, ranked No.2 worldwide as the city with the best investment potential for 14 consecutive years, is able to achieve its enviable track record in FDI partly because of its rankings (world No 1 on the Ease of Doing Business and No 5 on the Corruption Perception Index) on indices such as these. I don’t see how clever marketing alone can simply beguile investors into pumping money into a country. Unless I’m missing something, to me it appears that there are quite a lot of housekeeping matters and things we need to fix before we try to market our country as an investment destination. If we don’t attend to these necessary preconditions for attracting investment, we are only putting our cart before the horse.
7 comments:
Did you notice that no Islamic country scored a good ranking in these indexes? These are American and British imperialists still trying to show that Muslim countries and the so called third world countries are lagging behind in everything. The Western Ango-saxon countries score well in these things always. And they will come to our countries to teach us about corruption. Dont they have corruption in their countries? look at America today. See the corruption thats going on in their wall street, how the big bosses are being paid such huge bonuses at the cost of the ordinary people. These world bank, IMF, Transparency international and other organizations like them are just created to maintain their hegemony on us through these silly indexes. We dont give a shit about these things.
Anonymous above:
That's the problem with Maldivians. You guys like to live in self-denial. When you have a problem in your own house, you would rather find a scapegoat and blame it on a worldwide conspiracy by the West and the Jews to disrupt the Islamic world and the third world.
Why don't you for once face the reality of your "pious" country and try to correct and set order in the house before you attack the international organisations like Transparency International which is trying to spread international best practises.
Man, these people are unf***ing believable.
naimbe, why dont you send a copy of this post to Anti Corruption commissioner and president nasheed. They are very busy people. They dont have time to look at these things on their own. So, they need help for you guys.
DCJ you are spot on. Remember Gayoom's 'its simply not true' and 'there are no political prisoners in our jails' thing? thats what our mentality is about. You simply deny the existence of the problem. then there's no problem.
hehehe. Maldivians are suffering from The Ostrich Syndrome.
Naimbe, this came out just before elections last year, and did actually make news headlnes for a few days after Transparency Maldives published a press statement. http://www.minivannews.com/news_detail.php?id=5028
But of course, as with most other things in Maldives, it was only a short lived item and now we have all conveniently forgotten about it. And it appears we have East European corporations and other such people interested in investing, so who the heck cares whether they are bona fide or not eh?
anon 6:55 - thanks for your comment. Yes, its been a while since TI's index came out. I've infact talked about this in a post I made on 5th Dec 2008.
http://asknaim.blogspot.com/2008/12/why-arent-investments-coming-to-south.html
I dont know why our media didnt give it the importance it deserved. So, I tried our good old technique of sending smses to our friends in the cabinet and senior positions in the Govt. Most of them unfortunately havent even heard of this. Of course, it didnt come to me as a surprise.
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