It’s official: Santa Claus, in spite of many bitterly disappointed children’s faces around the family Christmas tree each year, is the only guy you can really trust.
We know this because a self-styled anti-graft group called Transparency International has just published its annual Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI) and found that Finland, home of Santa Claus (as well as the Nokia mobile telephone) is the most incorruptible country in the world.
“The CPI,” we are told, “is based on a three-year rolling average of surveys of business people, risk analysts and the public, with a maximum possible score of 10 (highly clean) and a minimum of zero (highly corrupt).” In spite of the fact that no members of the public with whom I came into contact in the course of my own survey of this survey had ever heard of Transparency International, the Finns (and their most famous citizen, by association) were reported to have scored an irritatingly squeaky-clean 10, placing them beyond reproach as far as corruptibility was concerned.
None of the 89 other countries in the survey sank so low as to rack up an untouchable zero, but I am ashamed to say that no less than four out of the bottom 10 were African. Bottom of the list, predictably, was Nigeria, romping home 90th out of a field of 90 with a score of 1,2. The other Africans at the bottom of the class were Mozambique (2,2), Kenya (2,1), Cameroon (2,0) and Angola (1,7). (Uganda, at 2,2, only just escaped inclusion in this category.)
The other countries making up the bottom-10 list were Russia, its former satellites of Azerbaijan, Ukraine and Yugoslavia, and the military-run archipelago of Indonesia.
Several anxious South Africans called me up (although how they knew that they could get me on my secret mobile phone number in 84th-ranked Cameroon at the time is a mystery) to say that South Africa, now that it had managed to weed out Stix Morewa and Hansie Cronje, must surely rank close to Finland in worthiness. I was forced to reveal to them that South Africa, with a very middle-of-the-road score of exactly 5,0, was actually placed at number 34. Way ahead of us were New Zealand, Iceland, Hong Kong, Chile and Singapore.
No African country, in fact, made it into the top 10, or even the top 20. Botswana didn’t do badly at 26; Namibia was at 31 and Tunisia at 33 – all ahead of South Africa. The rest of the continent was content to run neck-and-neck with the tail end of the pack, and match scores with places like Lithuania (Malawi at 4,1), the Slovak Republic (Senegal at 3,5) and cocaine-crazed Colombia (Ethiopia at 3,2).
Is there anything in all of these figures? Statistics, after all, are always highly suspect. Whom and what they are used for is intrinsically selective, and the scramble of percentages is scarcely ever applied to making the world a better place for the majority of its citizens. They are more often used to underpin the status quo.
My suspicion is that Transparency International, whoever they may be, is probably just another of those well-paid little think tanks with its finger on the pulse of economic power. Or to put it another way, six laanies with a fax machine and a list of influential e-mail addresses (if I may paraphrase from the heady liberal journalism of the 1990s). At any rate, they are certainly not based in Lagos. If they were, the results of their survey might well have looked rather different.
The survey begs the question of whether countries are born corrupt, achieve corruptness or have corruptness thrust upon them in the course of time. Equally, it does not help us to understand whether Finland, for example, is intrinsically incorruptible or simply gained its present unblemished reputation through hard work, luck and good governance as the days went by.
Whatever the case, the Finns are rigorous about maintaining their reputation for honesty. Take the case of their honorary First Citizen. Any other country with a claim on Father Christmas would have gone to elaborate lengths to demonstrate how his family tree lay deeply rooted in their native soil.
The Finns, with ever more irritating incorruptibility, have gone out of their way to show that, even though they are happy to profit from the association of the good St Nicholas with their snow-bound northern regions, the jolly old joker with the red-nosed reindeer is not really Finnish at all.
In their official Lapland website, they explain that St Nicholas (Santa Claus for short) is actually a 20th century adaptation of a real-life early Christian bishop who went around generously throwing gifts into the windows of underprivileged children in Turkey in the 4th century AD – something like an early cross between Nelson Mandela, Eva Peron and Jimmy Saville.
Yes, the original Santa Claus was actually a Turk.
Today’s Turkey (you guessed it) scored a mere 3,8 on the CPI scale, putting it at 50 on the scale of corrupt nations.
So how did Father Christmas end up in Finland? It seems that he was only answering the call of destiny. When Turkey’s fortunes started sliding several hundred years ago, the best of its heritage was steadily looted by countries whose star was on the rise.
St Nicholas was too good to be left behind in the smouldering ashes of Constantinople. His good name was steadily appropriated by the emerging civilisations of the frozen North, and he eventually ended up as everybody’s favourite European uncle.
It seems that there is hope in this – even for the hang-dog Nigerians. After all, let us not forget that the Finns themselves were unscrupulous, marauding Vikings once upon a time.
It would seem that being top of the CPI pile is merely a question of where you happen to be sitting on the turning wheel of history. That, and a little bit of luck.
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