Citizens are Losing Trust in the Institutions

Banja Luka/Berlin, 9^th July 2013- Transparency International has published the results of the Global Corruption Barometer (GCB) for 2013, carried out in 107 countries including Bosnia and Herzegovina.  The GCB is public opinion survey on corruption and bribery, and it presents citizens’ attitude to presence of corruption within different institutions.

GCB for BiH has shown this year that majority of citizens think that the level of corruption has worsened in the past two years- 34% think that corruption has increased a lot, 31% think that it has slightly increased, and 27% think that it has remained the same. This survey shows that the institutions people rely on to fight against corruption are themselves not trusted. This can be proven with the fact that 31% of citizens believe that the authorities are extremely ineffective in the fight against corruption, 39% believe that authorities are ineffective, 23% believe that they are neither effective nor ineffective, while only 6% believe that they are effective and only 2% believe that authorities are very effective.

On the other side, most of the citizens agreed that the state is being run by the several entities acting in their own interest- 21% think that the state is completely run by these individuals, and 46% think it is largely run by these self-interest groups. BiH citizens also believe that personal contacts are very important to get things done, and vast majority of 85% believe that corruption in the public sector is a serious problem.

When it comes to the perception of corruption by sectors, as in previous years, political parties are perceived to be most corrupt (48% consider them extremely corrupt, and 30% consider them highly corrupt). They are followed by medical and health services (48% and 29%), parliament/legislature (38% and 29%), then police, public officials/civil service and the education system. NGOs, military and religious organizations are considered to be the least corrupt.

The fact that 28% of people in order to receive some of the public services have paid the bribe, mostly to the medical and health services and to the police, is devastating. Most of these respondents (41%) claimed that they have paid the bribe to expedite services, 30% have paid the bribe to express gratitude for services or as a gift, 18% because they could not get services done in any other way, 11% in order to get cheaper services. When it comes to the reporting of corruption 63% of the respondents claimed that they would be willing to report an incident of corruption, the majority of them 47% would do so over the line for reporting corruption, while only 27% would dare to report the incident to the institutions. The respondents who claimed that they would not report the incident, 37% of them, as a reason for not doing so, indicated that their application would not have any effect (56%), which further confirms the luck of trust in the institutions which are supposed to fight against corruption.

These findings confirm the warnings of the Transparency International BiH about increasingly alarming level of corruption in BiH and constant drop of public confidence in the system. A large number of the incidents of corruption confirm that it has become a parasite that eats up each and every segment of society and BiH citizens have felt the greatest consequences. The GCB’s findings from the countries in the region have shown that most citizens consider that the level of corruption has dropped and the level of trust in the institutions has risen in the last two years, suggesting that BiH cannot expect different opinion of its citizens and their greater willingness to engage in the fight against corruption until they do not witness more decisive prosecution of corruption at all levels , starting from political corruption which is considered to be the most problematic.