Anna Persson, Bo Rothstein, Jan Teorell

If you drive on the beautiful roads in the mountains surrounding Cape Town in South Africa, you will eventually – and in the middle of nowhere – reach a road toll station with a sign on it stating that “This is a corruption-free zone”. Similar signs can be found outside the Ministry of Water and Irrigation in the Kenyan capital of Nairobi, on the main campus of University of Nairobi, on the doors of the Kilwa district office and the Mwanza health office in Tanzania, as well as in many other places on the African continent. While these signs do not necessarily tell us the truth, they still give us an important key to understanding the real-life context of many African societies. If you have to explicitly state that a certain place is a corruption-free zone, this should say a lot about how epidemic corruption is perceived to be in society at large. More specifically, this should lead us to suspect that corruption is not the exception to the rule, but the rule.