Corruption: Is there a
remedy for this evil?

News published by Brazilian press:

An intensivist physician is suspected to present ten consecutive medical certificates, including three false to have 462 days off due to being ill in the state of Bahia. In the same period, the public servant would normally serve as medical director in a countryside city in the state. The information is from the Department of Administration (SAEB), which clears signs of irregularities in the removal of 526 state workers.

(...) Ten certificates submitted during the period of over a year and a half, three were proven to be false, as Saeb through writing test expertise of the Department of Technical Police (DPT).

Source: G1 Globo - http://goo.gl/TcdPbB

We alert to the number of workers under suspicion, just in one state, Bahia: 526. These are not people set apart from society, without jobs or income. These are civil servants who, in general, are admitted by competition and know perfectly well the offered remuneration, even before taking place their positions.

The citizen initially quoted in the news is a doctor, a person with higher education, which proves once again that, as anyone certainly knows, instruction is one thing, education is another entirely different.

Scandals that are news on TV all the time do not have the so-called chicken thieves as protagonists. In addition to being people, mostly attended college, many have well-off life and no one in their right mind can understand why they reveal so much appetite for money!

The issue corruption has been treated in this space on several occasions. The late news was in issue 415, with editorial entitled "Fatherland of the Gospel, to where you walk?". Here is the link: http://www.oconsolador.com.br/ano9/415/editorial.html

Let us remember a statement made several years ago by a friend who had just arrived from a trip to Switzerland, a country he had not visited previously.

One morning he left the hotel to buy a newspaper. When he stood at a newsstand, saw magazines and newspapers available to the public, the price list posted in a visible place and a box for customers to withdraw their copy, there place the relevant amount. There was no one near the site, not the owner of the bank, or police at all.

Back at the hotel, he was told that was how it happened in the city, and for many years, because there everyone is respected and obviously nobody advanced on other people's property.

Clearly the friend remembered that such a practice would not be possible in Brazil, because in our country, unfortunately, the friend of other people would take not only the daily newspaper, but every newspaper, every magazine and even the newsstand.

Education... that is the magic word, the only one capable of ensuring that the example of Switzerland to become one day common practice not only in Brazil but worldwide, as our friend Aylton Paiva, from Lins (SP), wrote and posted last week, in a well-known social network: 

"The solution to corruption and other dishonest acts will not only, still necessary, the punishment of corrupt and offenders, but the moral education, ethics that should start from the cradle, not only with words, also with examples from home. Ethical values ​​must be nurtured in school, from nursery to university. In work environment. In business negotiations. In the actions and acts of citizenship.

Morals, ethics, honesty, truth, justice, solidarity are virtues or values ​​that need to be cultivated and exercised from an early age."