In these troubled times, as the Old World Order declines and a new one is going through excruciating labour pains struggling to be born, it behooves us citizens worried sick about Nepal’s rampant kleptocracy to seriously rethink where we should be going and how. Thanks to Donald Trump, it is now excruciatingly obvious what some of us have been saying for long: that the 2005/06 colour-coded “rhododendron revolution” in Nepal against its monarchial institution and Hindu identity was based on much duplicity and fraud. Today, the crows are coming home to roost. Starting with the prime minister, deputy prime minister as well as foreign, home, finance and other ministers, the entire lot is engulfed in corruption scandals that elsewhere would have seen them instantly resign from office if not head for jail. They don’t, and they use their hold on the reins of power to prevent the police and judiciary to even initiate investigations and cases against them. The rot extends all the way down to village and municipal ward leaders openly demanding bribes for services they are obliged provide.

This essay is just a sad continuation of similar warnings issued earlier and ignored, mainly because Nepal’s civic sphere of intellectuals and journalists has compromised itself and is mired in corruption that comes from hanging on to political coat-tails and giving up independence to rely on handout journalism. In an earlier essay some eight years ago, I had described the structural corruption behind foreign “grants” that saw Nepalis actually subsidizing Western contractors, something that USAID too now is seen to be rife in.

It was the case of the 70 MW Middle Marsyangdi hydroelectric project, a “grant” from Germany that was essentially a reallocation of funds from the aborted Arun-3 where Germany would pay for 82% of the project cost and Nepal would cover the remaining 18%. The contract fine prints, however, required Nepal to pay for any increases in cost that might be incurred. With the project controlled completely by German consultants and contractors, it was eventually completed with fifty months’ time overrun and costs ballooning to five times the going international per kilowatt construction costs. It meant that Nepal ended up paying 70% of the cost of the project, not the initially hoped for 18%. How many Nepali politicians and managers, to say nothing of Germans, personally benefitted from all this anyone’s guess.

Just over a year ago, I chronicled the corruption scams that Nepal’s current rulers are embroiled in. They make what in other normal countries would be embarrassing headlines in all newspapers almost every day. A popular online portal detailed eight major scams by those at the highest level of government, the culprits continuing in office with absolutely shameless impunity. It quoted another investigative report that detailed how those in power kept themselves in power by misusing government machinery. It is worth reproducing as it continues to be today’s sad current reality.

“They steal state revenues, capture development expenditure, engage in rent-seeking from the private sector and extract natural resources, milk wealth from citizens, control institutions, favour their kith and kins in lucrative dealings, and save the big fishes when things go south — all to amass wealth and consolidate power and use that to keep the corrupt mechanism intact. As all layers of state and non-state institutions are in bed for corruption, there is little room for accountability and justice.”

What is shocking is the blatant “who cares about your criticism” attitude. Bad as it is at the top national level, it gets disgustingly barefaced at the local ward level. In a study I was involved in recently, we interviewed village entrepreneurs eager to begin new ventures such as expanded dairy farming or small-scale food processing but who could not. They reported that so much bribe was asked even for registering their enterprises at the local level that it was just not profitable to move forward with the venture!

All this is contributing to a very foul public mood across Nepal. It ranges from resigned fatalism of the youth who see no future for them in the country to anger at their being betrayed by their leaders among party cadres. If there is one major proof that the current political system is not working, it is shown by the thousands of youths who migrate out for menial jobs every day from Tribhuban International airport, to say nothing of those who cross the border into India, especially in west Nepal. That people are willing to sell their property in Nepal to raise seven or eight million rupees to pay human traffickers to send their wards illegally to the US risking death in Mexican jungles is a measure of their distrust of Nepal’s kleptocratic Loktantrick governance. Now even that door is closed with Trump’s anti-illegal immigration campaign.

What is even more telling is the fatalism among the educated youth. Enrollment in colleges is declining to the extent that some courses have had to be cancelled due to lack of students. This is happening even in technical fields such as engineering and medicine, with students opting to go to India or abroad paying much higher fees. Such Nepali colleges are, as a result, mulling merger if not even closure. A tragic consequence of this is the recent suicide of a Nepali student at the Kalinga Institute of Industrial technology: at the bachelor of engineering level there is little that KIIT could be teaching that a Nepali engineering college could not.

Why do Nepali youth have no faith in Nepal’s higher education establishment? The answer is: party politicization of the academia and its administration with consequent degradation of academic quality. The country’s oldest Tribhuban University was saddled with a Nepali Kangress affiliated vice-chancellor who was a known plagiarist; and Kathmandu University is deadlocked over UML-Kangress bhagbanda (sharing of spoils of office) and unable to appoint a new vice chancellor. The result is that it is not just students but even good teachers who are leaving these universities for jobs outside.

The net result is that many voices are beginning to rise against this kleptocratic dispensation, especially among disillusioned cadres of big political parties, although they have yet to solidify into a large, conclusive movement. In their networks and gatherings, the anger against their life-long party bosses who treat their parties as fiefdoms and party cadres as serfs – all the while wallowing in rampant corruption – is deep-rooted and potentially volcanic. It is seeking revenge like the manic jilted lover; and party honchos are so fearful of them that they hesitate to hold local mass meetings.

The root cause of Nepal’s corruption is moral and ideological; and there are hardly any political leaders in major parties who are not tainted let alone who command a moral high ground. Political parties are far from what they or their names say: Nepali Kangress has long given up the political philosophy of democratic socialism (and the very concept of fight for social justice) that was espoused by its founders B.P. Koirala or Krishna Prasad Bhattarai. Communist parties, both United Marxist Leninists and the Maoists do not have an iota of Marx in them, but have gone the way of big lucre, more comfortable with crony capitalists than with peasants and workers.

Why such a degradation? Much of it can be traced to the political fraud perpetuated – in cahoots with foreign interests against both the King and the country’s Hindu identity as well as national cohesiveness – in 2005/06. It was not the King that dissolved the parliament: it was Nepali Kangress infighting; the restoration of a dissolved parliament (without going through due elections) whose people-given 5-year mandate had long expired, was most undemocratic; and those MPs so restored (lest we forget two eminent MPs former PM KP Bhattarai and former mayor of Kathmandu PL Singh both refused to enter the resurrected house), having sworn an oath to protect the 1990 constitution, proceeded to tear it up. A new edifice, this Loktantra, built on such a fraudulent foundation was bound to collapse, which is what we are witnessing currently with immoral alliances and protection of high and mighty from their malfeasance.

It was to address such distortions, and to bring back honest governance in Nepal, that a meeting was held on the eve of Democracy Day in Pokhara under the moral leadership of Dr Jagman Gurung and his Nepal Pragyik Manch. While still lacking organizational clout, it was a good moral stand – against unassimilable foreign agenda of republicanism, federalism and secularism (the words of former PM KP Bhattarai) that has not served the country or the people well at all. It was a good beginning, this emergence of a moral anchor for re-imagining a future movement to rid the country of kleptocrats.