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While various regulations are being put in place across the globe to address governance challenges, economic instability and conflict are exacerbating corruption.
How can we unlock good governance to ensure sustainable transformation and economic growth in challenging times?
This is the full audio from a session at the World Economic Forum's Annual Meeting in Davos on 18 January, 2024. Watch it here: https://www.weforum.org/events/world-economic-forum-annual-meeting-2024/sessions/being-honest-about-poor-governance/
Zeina Soufan, Senior Anchor, Asharq News
Tom Palmer, President and Chief Executive Officer, Newmont Corporation
Philip Isdor Mpango ,Vice-President of Tanzania, Office of the Vice-President of Tanzania
Peter Maurer, President of the Board, Basel Institute on Governance
Helen E. Clark, Chair, Lancet Countdown High-Level Advisory Board on Health and Climate Change
World Economic Forum's Centre for the Fourth Industrial Revolution:
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Podcast transcript
Zeina Soufan: Ladies and gentlemen, esteemed panellists and distinguished guests. My name is Zeina Soufan and I'm a business anchor with Asharq News. It is my honour to welcome you to a most timely discussion entitled, "Being Honest About Governance."
While regulations worldwide aim to tackle governance challenges, economic instability and conflict continue to exacerbate corruption, the importance of unlocking good governance cannot be overstated. The WEF Global Risks Report of 2024 paints a concerning picture of a global risks landscape that is gradually eroding human development progress, leaving both states and individuals vulnerable to new and resurging risks.
Major shifts in global power dynamics, climate, technology and demographics are putting significant pressure on the world to adapt to these risks at a time when the intertwined relationship between poor governance and pressing global risks is increasingly evident. As we come together to discuss governance, it is crucial to recognise the implications of global risks on the stability of nations and the effectiveness of governance systems.
The interconnected risks of AI-driven misinformation and disinformation, economic uncertainty and environmental perils call for innovative and proactive approaches to address transparency, accountability, and ethical leadership.
Today's discussion calls for a consideration of how governance systems can effectively respond to these pressing global risks, fostering enhanced cooperation and innovative solutions. I hope this panel will be a valuable platform to explore the impact of global risks on governance, to share best practices in combating corruption and to identify opportunities for collaboration and collective action.
And now, allow me to welcome my esteemed guests on this panel. His Excellency Philip Isdor Mpango, vice president of the United Republic of Tanzania, Excellency Helen Clark, chair of the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI), and former prime minister of New Zealand Tom Palmer, the president and chief executive officer of Newmont Corporation, and Peter Maurer, the president of the Basel Institute on Governance and former chief of the International Committee of the Red Cross.
And let me start by asking you president, because Tanzania is on the list of the countries with the best record in fighting corruption. With what lens do you view corruption? How do you define it?
Philip Isdor Mpango: Thank you, Madam moderator for having me on this eminent panel. Yesterday, we were discussing, I called it a sexy subject, which was agriculture and food systems. Now today, we have to discuss a very ugly subject. Quite frankly, corruption has very high costs to the economy. It has very high costs for those who are forced to pay any corrupt practice. Now in review, it takes several shapes and this is what I would call my definition of corruption.
One component is simply demand for unofficial payments. The other is when you ask for a bribe to get a service and the third component is when you demand a favour, including sex favours. So these are the three components that we view corruption in Tanzania. However, corruption also has several phases I would say.
There is a domestic phase, which is mainly as a result of weak internal controls, particularly within central government, within local government. But sometimes, it also takes on a foreign face and this is where, for example, some international companies have found to be directly linked to big corruption in some of our countries.
I do recall an example in 2021. When a European company, I wouldn't want to name it, was fined almost $222 million because he bribed our Tanzania Ports Authority officials, including the head of the Tanzania Ports Authority in order to get a lucrative tender to the port.
Zeina Soufan: Mr Vice President, this is a very important point, which I would like to move to Helen here because you are talking about multi-stakeholders here and I want to see how the EITI has, through its multi-stakeholder approach, managed or to what extent it manage to build this trust and accountability.
Helen E. Clark: So the founding assumption with the EITI over 20 years ago was that the natural resources of a country belong to the citizens of the country and they should benefit from the extraction. And when the EITI was set up at the global level and then at the level of each of the countries which joined up to implement the good governance standard like Tanzania. They all established multi-stakeholder groups which had government, civil society and industry.
Now, an example of how seriously Tanzania takes it is that the former auditor general became the chair of the multi-stakeholder group in Tanzania. They've taken the process extremely seriously.
And we have found that it's a platform on which civil society and companies actually talk to each other, which often doesn't happen if you don't deliberately create these spaces. And you put government in the room as well, all the stakeholders there to try and thrash through the issues. The idea is to get the information out there, shining a light on it, try to take away those corners, where corruption could intensify if you haven't got a spotlight on transparency.
Zeina Soufan: Tom, for you, from an industry perspective, what is corruption and what are the building blocks of trust?
Tom Palmer: Good morning everybody. I think about the environment that we're in today. And as we think about the world in which we're living, we're seeing the intersection of three very significant megatrends: the increasing societal demands, the acceleration of technological change and the geopolitical unrest that we're seeing around the world.
Those three mega trends, interacting with each other and creating an environment like we haven't seen before. The social and economic dynamics, you'd have to go back to the Industrial Revolution. I think we're going to see something similar over the next five or 10 years that we need to navigate through. Companies that don't understand that, or organisations if I broaden it from that, they don't understand that and then think about how they adapt to that change, I don't think will exist in the form they are today.
And one of the key risks at the heart of that very dynamic environment are the risks of corruption. And the companies or organisations that adapt and change and lead through that environment are those that have clarity of their purpose, and they have a clear set of values through which they define how they make decisions.
There are organisations that are radically transparent and are prepared to hold themselves to account. So corruption in many different forms will appear in the environment in which we're now operating and will continue to operate in and purpose values, transparency and accountability will be key to leading through that.
Zeina Soufan: Peter, given this complex background that Tom just gave about where we are are heading next, do you feel that good governance and fighting corruption is high enough on the global agenda?
Peter Maurer: Well, definitely not. Zeina, you were mentioning the Global Risks Report and it struck me, reading this year's global risk report and projection of what leaders think are important issue, that out of the 30 key threats for the future, corruption is not mentioned as an independent threat.
So it's diluted in the other analysis and this is contrasting very frankly, with my experience over so many years where I always did the taxi driver test coming to a country and to an airport asking the person driving me to the centre of the city what the most important issue was, and the recurringly most important issue was corruption and inflation.
So most likely, we do have a discrepancy on what leaders consider being threats of societies and reflected in the global risk report and what populations and societies believe it is. And I think we have many times over the last couple of years, we have rehearsed and reset how much corruption is a threat to the achievement of the SDGs.
We have seen that it is at the core of threatening good governance, it is at the core of threatening corporate governance. It has immense cost, as the Vice President has said: some estimated that 5% of global GDP is basically corrupt money.
So, it's a non-negligible part that is burdening public spending, which can be accounted for as corrupt money. And of course, again, as many of my co-panellists have said before, we see a systemic transformation of corruption at the present moment. It's not only paying bribes below the table. It's corruption permeating systems, processes, public, private and this is what the real threat is and given all what I just mentioned, that what my co-panellists have mentioned, there is probably a big – too big – discrepancy.
And it is particularly odd, if I may say one thing more, than at certain moment in the past, the international community has put in place, procedures and processes and countries have put in place procedures and processes, which were designed to address in a credible way corruption. We have the Partnering for Corruption Initiative at the World Economic Forum. We had the one Helen is chairing with.
We have a lot of experiences in supporting corporate governance and in defining and precising and advising on corporate governance and practices and whoever is a decent company today on the market has policies in place and still, we don't manage somehow to generate and have the political leadership on the international and national agenda except for a couple of countries and companies who took leadership.
Zeina Soufan: Speaking of political leadership, go back to Sir Vice President; you have the leadership that was able to identify how serious the threat of corruption is, what lessons can other countries who want to embark on such a journey learn and what have you yourselves learned?
Philip Isdor Mpango: Well, first, I must say that fighting corruption head-on is very risky. If you want an easy example, talk to Madame Ngozi when when she was minister [in Nigeria]. They ended up snatching her mother, her old mother.
Zeina Soufan: You have to pay a price.
Philip Isdor Mpango: So you need to have leadership. You need to be uncompromising. You must have the hard skin, I must say because, you know, it entails big returns to some. But for us, really, we have been able to succeed to some extent because number one, we focused on strengthening institutions of governance.
So the Comptroller and the Auditor General. At the very top level, we made sure that his office gets the resources in terms of money, budgetary resources, in terms of personnel, in terms of equipments, to be able to use technology, to monitor various transactions. But then we also had to strengthen the anti-corruption watchdog, the Prevention [and Combatting] of Corruption Bureau, we call it PCCB. This was very important. That entails also scrutinising the officers that are placed in those institutions.
But we also have the parliamentary watchdogs, the parliamentary accounts committee and deliberately we decided that the head, the chairperson of this committee, has to come from the main opposition party so that there is no hiding of whatever officials are doing but will also have the local authorities accounts committee in Parliament and these are very strong committees that have to ensure and keep track of what is actually going on in government.
We also have another institution which looks at public procurement; it is a regulatory authority. And again, that you have to be very careful in terms of who to select to track public procurement. Because 70% of government money goes through public procurement and you need a strong eye there.
So, but besides you have individuals, including what Madame Helen here said, that you have individuals who mobilize other stakeholders, so outside government, outside mainstream government, and the example she gave was the former head of the the Comptroller and Auditor General's office who established an independent institution again to double check what goes on in the public system and therefore, involving other players becomes a central part of the fight against corruption.
Zeina Soufan: Very good points. We'll come for elaboration on procurement, role of technology also there and also mobilization but I move to Helen here. Mr Vice President just said that it's very risky to fight corruption because there are people who are benefiting and there's lots of money.
Can good governance be good economics for everybody? And since we're embarking on this energy transition phase, what does a good transition look like from a governance point of view?
Helen E. Clark: Well, the energy transition carries a lot of governance risks. Let's be honest. When you have a gold rush, people cut corners and we need a lot more mining, fast, of strategic minerals. And a lot of these minerals are to be found in countries with the weakest institutional structures.
So any way we can support, you know, the lead reformers and countries to strengthen those institutions is extremely important. Alongside the EITI head, I've also been supporting the development initiative, which supports audit offices around the world and audit offices are actually under quite a lot of pressure. Not everyone's as kind to them as the Tanzanian government is to it's – another whole subject – but supporting the independence of the Comptroller and Auditor General is extremely important.
But for EITI, we commissioned work on the governance risks and we see them coming in the form of processes that don't have integrity when things are in a rush. There's a possibility of backhanders because people are competing to get contracts are very important mineral commodities. We see the potential to cut corners on social environmental reporting, to cut corners on engagement with communities.
In other words, you sort of have an image of the energy transition. It should be ushering in sort of peace and prosperity but it could usher in more conflict and division if we don't get the transition right.
And one country I've visited, as head of EITI is one which experiences already major social conflict around mining. They have a whole sub-department in the mining ministry that's dedicated to dealing with social conflicts but this is the reality; the transition has to be well managed and anything that the international development donor community can do to support countries that are trying to do the right things to get the institutions in place to deal with these issues is greatly appreciated.
Zeina Soufan: Tom, before I go deeply and elaborate on what Helen just said about speed and scale, I would like first to look, zoom in and look at the industry itself. It is the mining industry at the heart of the transition and it is a complex industry with complex supply chain.
So let's look at the industry from inside first. How do you look how do you identify the grey areas and can you influence behaviour and change across this chain and this complex chain?
Tom Palmer: Thank you. Maybe just to put what Helen's articulating into some numbers, humankind, since the dawn of time, has produced 700 million tonnes of copper. Between now and 2050, to go through the energy transition we need to produce another 700 million tonnes of copper. That's not even a critical mineral in some countries yet.
The biggest copper mine in the world is Escondida and it produces about 1.5 million tonnes of copper a year. So, the scale of what's required is mind-boggling. So when you think about, when you start to think about that challenge and think about that challenge as a mining company or as a mining industry as we come together and debate, the first thing you have to do is look within your house.
And it starts with ensuring that you have good governance systems in place, that you are clear on your purpose, that you're clear on expectations of how people work. When it comes to integrity, when it comes to compliance, that you have leadership development programmes in place that are developing leaders who are demonstrating that they are prepared to lead and behave appropriately, that you're independently governed by a board that holds you to account and you start to develop a culture within your organization that can withstand some of the threats that impact your business.
At Newmont, we're 103 years old, and I'm a product of that governance. I'm only the 10th CEO in that 103-year history. And every one of those appointments has been an internal successor. So we have a level of governance and continuity that allows us to then reach out and establish relationships.
So, we think about that complex supply chain and it starts from within. The first relationship that we have is with our workforce and establishing a relationship based on trust with your workforce and at the core of that is enabling people to come to work, do a good day's work and head home again to their family and loved ones with their safety in hand.
We're a high-risk industry and fatality risk needs to be managed and managed very well. And that is the basis of trust. We can't guarantee that fundamental contract with people who work for us in terms of their lives, then we don't move past go.
Those members of our workforce are members of our local communities and those local communities and members are constituents of the countries of the regions in which we work. So we work on a relationship of trust with our workforce that branches out to those other constituents.
Then, when we think about our relationships with the community leaders and governments and the relationships we have with suppliers and customers, we look to have a relationship based on trust and a relationship that's very long-term. And through our behaviour, over the long term, we can we can influence that supply chain and ultimately set an example for others to follow. That's what we can do as an organisation.
Zeina Soufan: Peter, outside mining, the bigger world, it's all about complex relationships, also. It is about influencing behaviours, it is about numbers, it is about meeting targets. And you said earlier that you fear corruption is sort of creeping into systems, baking, being part of their survival.
Do you feel we need a bigger lens, do we need behavioural sciences, do we need better understanding to start with?
Peter Maurer: I certainly do. And once again, I wanted to emphasize what my co-panellists have said before: once we have the institutions, the processes, the norms, the procedures, the learning, the structured learning, the focused attention on particularly sensible issues, there are still humans, there are networks there are people, as you said before, connected to communities.
And what I have learned in other areas is indeed that we have to ask the question, what informs behaviour and behaviour is not only informed by the threat of being punished for violation of norms, behaviour is structure that is informed by informal codes in societies, by ways people interact with each other, by leaders setting the tone, by identity.
And many times, I was in my other functions previously as president of ICRC, you can argue 100 times on whether it is or that is a violation of a norm. But then, my second line was always, do you really want to be that person who takes bribes or shoots civilians, in my previous life, is that what you want to be?
Is that what informs societies and I think, opening that lens also opens some new perspectives in governance and anti- corruption because it tells you the broader society which you need to message, the right messages, to set the tone to basically perform the message of integrity on what is what we want to be as institutions, as societies, as individuals.
And here, behavioural science has helped me, in many areas, to understand that to go maybe one step further in the trust-building exercise, and I say all of this, recognizing how important institutions, processes, norms and laws and principles are.
Zeina Soufan: And it's not easy as Mr Vice President can tell us after so much hard work, do you feel there are still loopholes that are difficult to close? You had just started elaborating on procurement on maybe using technology. Walk me through your thinking when it comes to these hard areas to just ease.
Philip Isdor Mpango: I can certainly confirm that. There are still many loopholes.
One, of course by its very nature, it is clandestine. It is not open and therefore, I think finding a way of removing a human hand, particularly using technology to us has helped a great deal.
So for example, if I introduce another dimension, the courts – we have established a special court to prosecute corrupt officials, economic saboteurs. But what is required was we use technology, one, to ensure that all these cases can be tracked. And it was it was fairly clear that once we try to eliminate the human hand in the processes...
Zeina Soufan: Humans have always a way to go around technology because they invented it, no?
Philip Isdor Mpango: Of course, that's why I'm saying it's not all over but at least you are able to contain it to a very significant degree. But the other one is really to use independent think tanks and individuals to report on what people perceive, what people see, experience.
So for example, we have an institution, which you call Research on Poverty Alleviation and each year, they do produce a report based on research on corrupt practices across the economy and this has helped us. It keeps the institutions in focus also to be alert that someone is watching us and will be reporting us.
So loopholes are always there. But the issue is how to try and minimize them.
Zeina Soufan: Helen, it's hard work, yeah. We have more transparency and maybe we have better laws. The Vice President was talking about implementation, there's always talk of an implementation gap. What do you think?
Helen E. Clark: Well, it's like the old story with tax laws, isn't it. Pass a law closing loopholes and the lawyers are busy finding the next one. And it's a bit of the same with corruption, you know.
And really come back, I think the point Peter was making, it's about value systems and that strongly about your company as well. It's about value systems. It's about having in your public service, in your company's value system that says honesty is a top value for our government, for our society, for our company, I think the added value EITI brings in this area is that involvement of civil society. Get civil society at the table, where it's got a stake in getting the information out there, ensuring that the process works well.
I mean, our processes for compliance with the standard require disclosure of contracts, disclosure of all payments, disclosure of all revenues, disclosure of beneficial ownership. You know, and this is an enormous pile of information and we've been working to draw this to the attention of these Comptroller and Auditor Generals because we're not a prosecuting authority.
We're simply a validating body of how a country's processes perform against the standard. But in that process of disclosure, there will be information that is of interest to the Comptroller and Auditor General. So they have to know that this resource is there and how to use it. So, it's also joining the dots within government systems as well.
Zeina Soufan: Yeah, we'll go back to the point of the reports that you issue in a bit but I want to go here to Tom. So we have very ambitious plans on energy transition you mentioned and Helen also mentioned we need to move with speed with scale.
Now Newmont has an experience with moving speed and scale in recent history. What have you learned?
Tom Palmer: We, so Newmont is 103 years old, as I said. Our modern life is a gold mining company. So you look at Newmont's history, we were a diversified mining company, there was a big hostile bid in the late 80s. We paid a big dividend and sold a bunch of assets and became a gold mining company with some mock gold mines in Northern Nevada. And we're a US gold mining company. And we headed offshore in the 90s, we were the first Western company into Peru.
We went into Indonesia, the Suharto regime and one of the first Western companies into the former Soviet Union in Uzbekistan. And we were cowboys from northern Nevada who got our backsides kicked. You might learn a lot of hard lessons and we're a founding member of Pachi and I think we're a founding member of EITI and we're talking 15, 20 years ago, it was about us learning those lessons.
And there's the African proverb that sits behind that is if you want to go fast, you go alone and if you want to go far we go together. And we learned that and we learned that the hard way. So when we think about where we are today as an organization where we are today as a mining industry and the debates that we're having as an industry group, is where we've got two challenges.
One is that the world demands the minerals that we produce for the energy transition. And we have a reputation that is a fairly dark legacy in terms of the mining's reputation globally if you look back over the centuries and sadly, more recently with the Tailings dam disasters. So how do we reconcile our reputation and then the society's need for us as an industry and I think it boils back to we go far together because we need to challenge ourselves around multi-stakeholder governance.
We need to be prepared to have ourselves govern, govern ourselves but have others govern ourselves to have a multi-stakeholder governance group that has behind it as Helen says, radical clear transparency to hold ourselves to account and to be prepared to ask and listen to other perspectives and points of view that will change our behaviour and give us an opportunity to influence others. That is going to be absolutely essential. If the world is going to have the metals and minerals necessary for the energy transition.
Zeina Soufan: Peter, the world wants to move fast with energy transition, the world wants to move fast with reconstructing after the many wars that we have across the globe. There's urgency, lots of money on the table.
Do you worry and we know that not everybody is a champion of good governance and anti-corruption? At the Basel Institute, do you try to bring good agents together?
Peter Maurer: Well it is as we have said before, there are sectors and areas in times which are prone to corruption and which need decisive action and I can only endorse and emphasize that multi-stakeholder collective action is probably the template which brings us farthest in recognizing the importance of norms and principles and compliance and the importance also of understanding dilemmas.
And you can't solve dilemmas by just applying norms and standards, you need to advance by understanding what is possible, what the obstacles are, in defining timeframed step-by-step transformations towards and this needs to be negotiated and it needs to negotiated in a transparent way and people need to understand where we put the cursor.
And this is immensely difficult because the question is a little bit, when do you enter into the political discussion the issue of balance? You want to be strong on norms and principles but you also want to acknowledge power and realities and economic realities and social realities. And you can only do it when we have a structured framework of conversation which brings more than just one stakeholder to the table.
And this is an issue of negotiating agreement how we deal with these issues. And that's a little bit of tension between anti-corruption and good governance as a compliance-informed and norm-informed process and structuring of a political process. Which brings us to agreement, what is decent and doable and what the best deal on the table is. T
hat's the dilemma I see and where we work and where we try really to see the kind of connect the micro with the macro. What is the experience when we look at the ground of problems and where they emerge and how can we transform them.
Zeina Soufan: You can win the fight against corrupt leadership? You have humanitarian experience on the front lines, what did they teach you?
Peter Maurer: I do believe we have to believe it too, winning the fight, even if I don't want to appear naive. But on the other hand, I have heard over the last 30 minutes methodologically, we are up to the task.
We have experiences, we have positive experiences and therefore, there is no intrinsic obstacles which prevent us from doing better.
Zeina Soufan: Mr Vice President, given how the mining sector and its relationship to corruption has perhaps complicated governance for the African continent – and here I want to zoom out – what can you say about that and can you give us any good examples of approaches that actually worked from the continent in the mining?
Philip Isdor Mpango: Well, I think for the mining sector, one has to start with the process of awarding mining contracts. And here, in our case, what we did was to try make that process as transparent as possible. Because when these contracts are awarded behind the scenes, that's where the problem starts.
So, one way was to say okay, there is a mining area X that is Tanzanite and we advertise and then they compete. So, the awarding is done openly and to us that did help a lot compared with when it was done behind the scenes. But it is tricky still. It is tricky still.
Zeina Soufan: For the whole continent not only in the case of, Tanzania.
Philip Isdor Mpango: No, this was in the case of Tanzania for the entire continent. I'm afraid in other parts of the continent that I know, that has not been the case and particularly because some of us leaders are actually the ones propagating corrupt practices in the mining sector. And that becomes the problem because if you are not if you are part of the problem, you cannot solve it that easily.
Zeina Soufan: That's a very, very good point that, if you allow me, I want to move to Helen here. How have your reports exposing government practices help in perhaps opening dialogues on national levels, mobilizing perhaps anti-corruption groups also to address weaknesses in governance?
Helen E. Clark: Well, the reports are important and they need to be picked up on media, they need to be picked up by parliamentarians, they need to be picked up by civil society. I think a lot more use could be made of them, frankly. And as I said, also used by the Comptroller and Auditor office and prosecutors and others who are looking for malpractice, shall we say and for evidence.
But the EITI reporting process should be regarded as a huge resource to inform the public about the state of the sector, what's going on, what's it earning, how many is it employing, you know, what are the deals. Just shine a light on it. Transparency is a good thing in itself.
Zeina Soufan: Tom, if you if you look how things were 20 years back and then you want to look forward, what would you say about this path to fighting corruption and good governance? How would you describe it? Is it one path?
Tom Palmer: There'll be a twisted non-linear path and probably a few parallel paths and going backward a few times as well. I think the work that we can do as an industry, we're fragmented still.
We've got multiple standards that govern how we do our work. And they're desperately overdue to be converted to a single set of standards and I would argue multi-stakeholder governed that would allow us to say if you're going to develop a mining project from exploration through to post mine life and closure, then they are governed by a consistent set of standards that any country should say the only mining operators that are going to come to this country are those that abide by those standards.
If I look 20 years from now, that is the standard, those standards will govern how we operate. They'll govern how we establish contracts or agreements to mine and they'll talk to how we work together. There is an example in Panama right now where the world needs copper and there's a copper mine producing 400,000 tonnes of copper that's now shut down.
You go back to what was the nature of that contract that was formed? And was it fair, in terms of returns for the local communities, returns for the company developing and returns for the government. You moved down some 20 years and a lot of circumstance there in Panama, that we would hope that we're learning those lessons and incorporating that in the standards that we have as an industry and how we work with governments and other stakeholders.
Zeina Soufan: Peter, in that sense is the conversation for good governance and anti-corruption going in the right direction in your opinion?
Peter Maurer: In some places, it's going in the right direction. In other places, it's terribly going in the wrong direction. And that was my point at the beginning of this conversation.
I do believe we need to shift the attention, the balance, to put anti-corruption and good governance much more prominently on the international agenda. Because if we don't, we will pay a very heavy price in the negative impact of an accumulation of negative impact that we are looking at and moving the cursor is all about defining strategic interventions, keeping high standards of values and norms and principles alive. At the same time, showing realism and flexibility.
What's the next step and the second next step is in order to achieve the objective, we have to have a North Star and know that we don't arrive at the star tomorrow. And these are all important elements to consider and I do believe that it's one of those sectors where it strikes me how much knowledge there is to how to approach the issue and how little political and leadership dynamic there is to really run with it.
I mean, we have seen that the international community with all caution that I say that can rally around climate change and move the cursor a little bit if not sufficient. We are not even there in anti-corruption.
Zeina Soufan: Helen, I want your thoughts on the Tom's been and also on what Peter just added now.
Helen E. Clark: Well, he's right, it's like the path is there, right? So you got very committed countries trying to do the right thing. I think some are yet to drink the Kool Aid on this.
But we have to keep supporting all those initiatives which hold transparency and honesty as a virtue and work to ensure that what really belongs to the citizens of a country which is, you know, the outcome of revenues from productive enterprise, it's just clean.
Zeina Soufan: Sir Vice President, would you have done something differently? Very briefly and we'll continue the answer outside.
Philip Isdor Mpango: Well, I think what I would have done differently from the beginning is to involve the community right from the beginning, even in schools because we have realized that corruption naturally starts even at a very early age. So involving the community and all stakeholders will give us mileage.
Zeina Soufan: Very wise, thank you, Your Excellency, Philip Isdor Mpango, vice president of the United Republic of Tanzania.
Madame Helen Clark, chair of the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative and former prime minister of New Zealand. Tom Palmer, president and chief executive officer of Newmont Corporation and Peter Maurer, the president of the Basel Institute on Governance and former chief of the International Committee of the Red Cross.
Thank you very much. Thank you very much.