THE POSITIVE MULTIPLIER EFFECT OF CORRUPTION By Muhammed Ali

I was engrossed in that textbook in my days of secondary uniform-wearing, when I delighted in storing in my head the grains of transcendent intellectual diadems; when my sauntering eyes first stumble on the concept of multiplier. Those days, I was so crazily and exceedingly in love with the science of numbers which then faintly manifested itself in Economics textbooks.
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I know multiplier as a concept very well, but I do not know how to make the meaning of corruption to move from its relativity, lest I am drawn to fall in the pit dug by that scholar from the swamphood who propounded the goat and yam theory.
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Simply put, when government spends money, the effects of the multifaceted processes or trajectory through which the expenditure gets to the hands and bellies of the masses, or the common man in the street, is the multiplier, or government expenditure multiplier.
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But one must point out here that there is assumption embeded in the above conceptual definition of multiplier. That government is always rght in its spending. Whether it is malversational or corrupt shouldn't be our concern. This assumption must have sprouted from the very jaundiced pedestal upon which some scholars of economics want the economic science to rest. They argued that economics should and must always be viewed as a positive science that concerns itself with "what is" and not "what should be" or "what ought to be". But this reduces the "homooaikonomous" (the economic mind, the rational thinker who is concerned with the laws that goven wealth) to an armedchair academic, not bothered about policy issues, policy designing and indeed implementation. No! This cannot stand! As far as an economist must make policies, he/she cannot be insulated from "what should be", and the wisdom and foibles that make up his being is brought to bear in his work. That is why I had issues with Dr Iweala, for she ostensibly has been mired in the "false paradigm model of development", hence alawys seeming to see things from neoliberal prism.
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On corruption and multiplier, what we have always had as an addition to the real multiplier was an illusionary multiplier effect of corruption. People who amass stolen funds or plunder our common patrimony, spend it and more money flows to the hands of the people. Therefore, part of what we actually had as addition to welfare was naturally designed to be short-lived. What do you expect from the cutting of the roots to the trees of that multiplier? I mean the multiplier effect of corruption.