FROM SELF-INTEREST TO RESPONSIBILITY: LEVINAS'S ETHICS AS A FRAMEWORK FOR ADDRESSING EMBEZZLEMENT OF PUBLIC RESOURCES IN TANZANIA

Embezzlement of public resources of public funds remains a persistent challenge in Tanzania, undermining economic growth, governance, public trust, and socio-economic development. Despite the existence of legal mechanisms for curbing corruptions, misuse of entrusted resources continues. This persistence indicates that the problem extends beyond institutional weaknesses to the insufficiency of purely rule-based and compliance-oriented anti-corruption frameworks, revealing a deeper moral crisis of responsibility, relationality, and ethical consciousness among public officials. The study is therefore aims to investigate the central issue: to what extent Emmanuel Levinas’s ethics can provide a transformative ethical framework capable of complementing existing legal mechanisms for curbing embezzlement of public resources and related forms of corruption in Tanzania? The study demonstrates that Levinas’s ethics addresses the interior disposition, conscience, and intentions of officials that laws alone cannot reach.By relocating accountability prior to legal obligation and reframing public office as a vocation of service rather than discretionary power, the study achieves its objective. It shows that integrating Levinas’s ethics with Tanzania’s legal mechanisms fosters genuine moral responsibility, transforms institutional culture, and renders external controls more effective, offering a pathway from mere compliance to ethical governance oriented by human dignity. Therefore, the study makes a very important practical contribution to the efforts for fighting embezzlement of public resources in Tanzania. Rather than calling for new punitive laws, it demonstrates that sustainable success in fighting embezzlent is possible if ethically responsible public servants capable of recognizing citizens as vulnerable Others whose wellbeing depends on the faithful stewardship of public resources are cultivated.