JPO Stories
Tea, cookies and corruption
Constance Hybsier is a current German JPO with UNDP Viet Nam working on human rights, anti-corruption and civil society. She grew up in Berlin, Mongolia and Singapore.
Published in the UNDP Bulletin, February 2008
Ha Noi, 13 February - The first time I came across the story of Ms. Duc was during my regular morning news check. A local Vietnamese paper told the story of a pensioner of a different kind.
Instead of leading a quiet life, the retired school teacher chases crooked police officers, takes pictures of people asking for bribes, and hassles those requesting money for things that are supposed to be free. She devotes her time and her pension to fight corruption.
There is a lot of talk about corruption in Viet Nam (it recently ranked 123 out of 170 on Transparency International's corruption index). And this talk has led to action. Three years ago, the Government passed its first anti-corruption law and supplemented it with a wide secondary legislative system that fills up a whole A4 sheet on my wall. Viet Nam is now working on a national anti-corruption strategy and encourages more involvement from the media and civil society.
Although data on corruption are hard to come by, a 2005 diagnostic study measuring the perception of corruption in seven provinces revealed that about 85 percent of civil servants are not "enthusiastic" about fighting corruption because they are afraid of being victimized; that only 11 percent of civil servants would decline a bribe; and that the housing and customs offices are regarded as the most corrupt state institutions in Viet Nam.
At UNDP, we have been trying to help monitor corruption levels and provide a system of reliable data and analysis. The story of Ms. Duc was intriguing because she seemed to have found a way to identify cases of corruption, follow up on them and even resolve them. Not everyone has appreciated her efforts, however, and some have even thanked her with the kind of flowers you don't wish to receive in Viet Nam - funeral flowers. I decided to pay her a visit.
It had been raining all day, and when I arrived at her place, I found the front of her house flooded. Her neighbour helped me jump from brick to brick, crossing the large puddles (I was a soggy mess when I finally introduced myself to her). It was very much like visiting my gran's place. There were pictures of her grandchildren all over the house, and there were cookies and green tea on the table. It was actually quite hard to get her to talk about her corruption work. She asked me where I was from, if everybody in my family had blond hair, and if I liked Viet Nam. And only then she told me her story.
Ms. Duc retired in 1984. Since then, she has been receiving on average of five complaint letters and dozens of phone calls everyday from across the country. They are letters from parents who disagree that they should pay for their children's good exam results; from people who refuse to pay nurses to care for patients; and from those who disagree that a simple government form should cost money. They all renounce and object to a corrupt system. They have all stopped trusting that officials would be able to do anything about it.
But they all trust Ms. Duc. Her connections to important officials - her name Le Hien Duc was in fact given to her by Ho Chi Minh - and her computer literacy and access to the internet have helped her expose everything from small-time bribery to large-scale corruption, adding to her fame and resulting in more letters. She also uses the media to help find information and publicise stories. Journalists call her regularly to ask if there are any new leads they should follow.
In the middle of our conversation, she pulled out a big folder and showed me a letter: "Dear Ms. Duc, we are happy to inform you that you have won Transparency International's Integrity Prize 2007 for your work," read the letter. "We hereby would like to invite you to Berlin for the official ceremony." She had been given the most prestigious anti-corruption prize in the world!
Later, I left her house with a lot of - both sad and inspiring - stories. I also left with new insights and a much better understanding of how things work, for now, and how they could be changed. I jumped on my bike and rode it through the crazy traffic back home to my small apartment. As I was about to hop on my couch, the telephone rang. It was a friend of mine.
"Hi, Conny, did you have to pay $10 to re-register your name with the police for your new lease? I thought it was supposed to be done by the landlord for free?"
Constance Hybsier, February 2008
