Even the most educated African citizens and public officials often have attachments to their cultural heritage. Perhaps for this reason, many African countries have retained traditional practices alongside modern governance institutions. While this has many advantages, such as increasing legitimacy and social cohesion, some of these traditional practices and attitudes are in tension with the contemporary state’s demands for accountability and transparency, and it can be challenging to differentiate acceptable and unacceptable practices at the intersection of the traditional and modern spheres.

Consider, for example, Sierra Leone. Prior to the establishment of the modern state, much of Sierra Leone consisted of chiefdoms. Sierra Leone considers the traditional institution of the chiefdom so vital that the Constitution reserves twelve seats in Parliament for Paramount Chiefs under customary law. What is the appropriate practice regarding gift-giving to chiefs who are also serving in Parliament? In traditional Sierra Leonean culture, visitors and petitioners are expected to give chiefs expensive gifts. However, under Sierra Leonean law, public officials, including Members of Parliament, are not allowed to accept gifts above a certain value. Similarly, in many of Sierra Leone’s chiefdoms, by custom, the chief would have the authority to determine land use rights, including those for activities like mining. However, under Sierra Leone’s written law, particularly the Mines and Minerals Development Act, the Ministry of Mines and the National Minerals Agency are empowered to grant licensing rights pursuant to the provisions of that Act. Mining company representatives often offer gifts to chiefs to acquire mining rights in their Chiefdoms—as tradition dictates. But offering such gifts to ministry officials would be an unlawful bribe under Sierra Leone’s anticorruption laws. More broadly, in many African societies—like most societies the world over—the traditional practice is to favor one’s family. This traditional kinship preference can create serious tensions for public servants: the expectations of their families and communities may conflict with ethical and professional rules that embrace universalism and prohibit nepotism as a form of corruption.

Dealing with this tension can sometimes be challenging, not least because in many countries, including Sierra Leone, the anticorruption laws are largely borrowed from other countries that do not have the same cultural traditions, and these laws tend to neglect these tensions. This is not to say that corrupt practices should simply be tolerated or indulged because they are part of the “traditional culture.” Doing so would undermine the whole idea of the contemporary state and the tenets of democracy, accountable leadership, and good governance. The challenge is appropriately crafting rules that will help navigate the tension so as to preserve the sanctity of traditional institutions while not undermining the ethical and legal standards appropriate to a modern state and its institutions.

In Sierra Leone, the laws have not gone far enough to unify the accountability regimes sufficiently. Although some chiefs have been investigated and convicted for misappropriating the resources of their people for personal use, enforcing anticorruption laws against the chiefs has proven to be difficult in most cases. Some of these chiefs do not even understand the laws, and simply reference “tradition” as a sort of carte balance authority. Strictly enforcing the law against the chiefs would lead to so many arrests that it would overwhelm the capacity of the anticorruption agency (ACA) to handle them all. The ACA has therefore emphasized public education regarding appropriate and inappropriate behavior, targeting the areas where this is an especially high priority. The ACA also tracks complaints and uses informal means to convey to the chiefs and others that they are behaving in ways that are no longer acceptable and that they must desist. Only when education, persuasion, and warning fail will the ACA bring to bear the full force of the law.

But in the long term, the root of the problem must be confronted, and a clear choice must be made. If a particular practice is deemed unacceptable or punishable, it should be applied to all. If, on the other hand, a country determines that a given traditional practice is consistent with the country’s idea of acceptable behavior, this should be clearly spelled out in the law. But this cannot be simply a top-down project. Instead, it is crucial to create a dialogue with traditional institutions to develop an understanding of the nuances that need to be regulated within the general anticorruption regime.