Category Archives: Guest Commentary

Guest Post: Time to Go Beyond Anti-Corruption Agencies in Sub-Saharan Africa

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Njoya Tikum, United Nations Development Programme Regional Anti-Corruption Advisor for Africa and Yale University World Fellow, contributes the following guest post:

To achieve the aspiration for an inclusive and sustainable human development in Africa, as articulated in the Africa Union’s (AU) Agenda 2063 and reiterated in the Common Africa position on post 2015, African countries must reconsider their approach to the fight against corruption. In the last 15 years, the international community of anticorruption practitioners and advocates have induced African countries to establish anticorruption laws and bodies. With few exceptions, almost every African country—sometimes of their own volition and at times under immense pressure from international financial institutions—has embarked on wide-ranging reforms aimed at strengthening state accountability and eradicating corruption. However, these interventions have not resulted in any noticeable decline in corruption in most parts of Africa. Indeed, multiple indexes such as Transparency International’s Corruption Perception Index (CPI), the Mo Ibrahim Foundation’s Governance in Africa Report, and the Afrobarometer, indicate that corruption has been on the steady rise in Africa. The critical question, then, is why the legion of interventions aimed at combating corruption have not yielded positive outcomes.

With monumental trust deficit between the state and citizens in Africa, relying on Anti-Corruption Agencies (ACAs) to fight corruption can only yield limited results. For many countries, the establishment of an ACA was just another box to tick in order to get the next round of development assistance; the agencies themselves are mere window dressing, often suffering from institutional weaknesses and a lack of sufficient human and material resources. In several African countries, for example, ACA funding is tied to presidential benevolence instead of allocation through a transparent national budgetary processes. They are staffed by people with no technical expertise, sometimes including retired public servants who have no real zeal to rock the boat. In these countries, the modus operandi is to fight corruption in areas earmarked by the ruling political regime. In some countries, leaders have used the ACAs to further witch-hunts against political opponents.

How does Africa navigate itself out of this quagmire? To win the battle against corruption, Africa must move beyond offices and notepads to pragmatism and action, exploring new and innovative solutions:

  • To begin with, anticorruption strategies must be comprehensive, and must include governance innovations such as open data, transparency and accountability in business, procurement, construction, etc. As part of this comprehensive approach, resources from the national budget must directly be allocated for anticorruption capacity building as part of national development plans (NDPs). As with other parts of NDPs, annual and biannual benchmarks and targets must be established to track the progress of anticorruption initiatives.
  • In addition, African governments can and should make use of new information and communication technologies (ICTs) and citizen social accountability tools. For instance, a number of web based applications have been developed to report instances of corruption in real time, providing an opportunity for cheap, affordable solutions to citizens and quick responses/actions by anti-corruption agencies and integrity institutions. See, for example, the Huduma, Ushahidi in Kenya and Frontline SMS campaigns on drug stock outs in the region.
  • Civil society organisations (CSOs) must play an increased role as the true watchdogs of the people. Given these responsibilities, and the need for CSOs to be autonomous and sensitive to local needs, it is unfortunate that almost 90% of anticorruption CSOs in Sub-Saharan Africa are funded by international donor agencies. The funding strategy must be adjusted, with national governments and other non-state actors taking up more responsibility for supporting anticorruption CSO activities.
  • Speaking of the international community, development partners must switch from playing a hypocritical role where they condemn corruption in the public sector in Africa but do little to stop corruption by private sector groups from their countries. They must embrace a new form of partnership where the private sector, including banks and transnational companies, are held to the same standards as public institutions.

Guest Post: A “Right to Truth” in Grand Corruption Cases?

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Lucas E. Gómez and Ignacio A. Boulin Victoria of the Latin American Center for Human Rights (Centro Latinoamericano de Derechos Humanos, CLADH) in Argentina contribute the following guest post:

Argentina, 1978. In the midst of terror, a group of parents searching for their children finds no answer in domestic justice. Thousands of habeas corpus petitions are rejected by judges. The military dictatorship denies having any clue about them: Videla, the leader of the government, declares: “they are neither dead, nor alive; they are disappeared.” These parents respond with innovative strategies (maybe without being aware of the innovation): They start sending letters of complaint (over a thousand) to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IAHCR). The result: the IACHR visits Argentina and issues a 1980 report recognizing widespread human rights violations; the report has an enormous impact both inside and outside of Argentina. Yet by 1990, these parents still don’t know what happened to their children. Despite the return to democracy in 1983, and some trials of military officers and terrorists shortly thereafter, in 1986 and 1987 Congress passes two acts restricting the criminal prosecution of military officers, and a few years later, President Menem pardons both military hierarchies and terrorists, releasing them from jail.

Argentina, 1995. Some of these parents devise a new strategy: Even if criminal prosecution is forbidden, they assert that there is still a “right to the truth”—a right to know what happened to the disappeared. Though Argentina’s Supreme Court rejects the claim, the parents again take the case to the IACHR. Finally, in 1999, Argentina settles the IACHR case, recognizing the existence of the right to truth. This development ultimately led to the re-opening of the criminal prosecutions against military officers: Once information about the atrocities came out, society started mobilizing for justice. The right to truth put in front of people’s eyes the extent and gravity of the crimes, and the identities of both the victims and the perpetrators. Continue reading →

Guest Post: U.S. Implementation of the EITI–Good Progress, But Needs Improvement

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GAB is delighted to welcome back Daniel Dudis, Senior Policy Director for Government Accountability at Transparency International-USA, who contributes the following guest post:

The United States recently published its first narrative report and payment reconciliation report under the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI). The EITI was founded in 2003 to help end the “resource curse” by which the revenues generated from natural resource extraction benefit a small group of politically-connected insiders and do nothing to improve the lives of the vast majority of people in many resource-rich countries. The concept that underpins the EITI is simple: by requiring participating resource extraction companies to report the payments they make to all levels of government in a country, while simultaneously requiring participating governments to report the revenues (including royalties, bonuses, rents, penalties, fees, and corporate income taxes) received from those companies, one can compare the reported figures and bring transparency to an often opaque sector. This transparency can in turn be used to hold governments accountable for how they distribute and spend resource wealth. Membership in the EITI is voluntary; there are currently 49 countries participating. The EITI is governed at both the international and national levels by multi-stakeholder groups composed of representatives of government, civil society, and industry.

The recently published U.S. EITI report covers payments made and received in 2013. There is much valuable information in the both report and the accompanying U.S. EITI website. The Department of Interior is to be commended for publishing 100% of payments it received in 2013 from companies producing on federal lands and in federal waters (totaling approximately $12 billion), as well as state-by-state royalties for 18 resource-rich U.S. states. The report also provides detailed information on natural resource extraction governance at the federal, state, and tribal levels, statistics on the size of the extractives sector (in terms of economic output and employment), as well as a valuable assessment of the revenue sustainability in 12 resource-dependent counties.

That said, there are a couple of important respects in which the report falls short: Continue reading →

Guest Post: Empowering Youth To Fight Corruption — Examples from Kosovo

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Shqipe Neziri, Manager with UNDP’s anticorruption program in Kosovo, contributes the following guest post on behalf of UNDP-Kosovo. [Note: For purposes of this post, in reflection of the fact that Kosovo is not a member of the UN, references to “Kosovo” should be understood to be in the context of Security Council Resolution 1244 (1999)):

Young people are often forgotten victims of corruption, left without an opportunity to voice their concerns, to help make positive changes, or to enhance their skills and become active citizens for a better future. Yet young people can play an important role in the fight against corruption. They tend to be more open to wide-scale socio-political transformation and have less vested interested in maintaining the status quo. Moreover, the values and attitudes of young people today will shape the values of the society tomorrow. The question is how to harness then energy and innovation of young people, and to provide the right kinds of support.

UNDP’s recent efforts in Kosovo may provide an example of how to foster a youth-based anticorruption movement. Corruption in Kosovo is a serious problem, viewed by Kosovars as the third-most serious problem, after poverty and unemployment. Kosovo’s population skews young –half of its 2 million citizens are under the age of 30 – and Kosovo’s young people are frustrated by corruption and lack of economic opportunity. (The overall unemployment rate is 35%, while unemployment rate of youth aged 15-24 years is 60%.) For several years, UNDP Kosovo has been placing youth at the core of its development support. Through our anticorruption efforts we have been helping to strengthen the voice of the youth and to foster their participation in decision making through the use of traditional and social media, and working to make institutions more responsive to youth.

What are some of our most successful youth-focused anticorruption initiatives? Here are some examples, which might serve as useful models for others: Continue reading →

Guest Post: Spend Anticorruption Resources on Professional Training, Not Postgraduate Education

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Alan Doig, Professor at Newcastle Business School, Northumbria University, contributes the following guest post:

Resources for anticorruption are scare; how should they be spent? In particular, how should the international community (national aid agencies, international institutions, and private donors and foundations) allocate resources for education and training programs for anticorruption professionals?

Although “education” and “training” are often lumped together as one category, in fact they are quite different. Education is about the acquisition of knowledge, with the accompanying change in awareness and understanding, through the provision and assimilation of information. Training involves the acquisition of the applied knowledge and technical skills required to improve individual and organizational performance in the workplace, invariably in relation to specific roles or functions. In terms of impact, education would look for longer-term benefits and impact while training can be judged more immediately by what the person does once trained.

The question of how to spend the even more limited funds that are not tied to the big spenders (the multilateral and bilateral donors) brings this issue into sharp focus, and raises the question of whether too much too much is allocated to postgraduate anticorruption education, at the expense of practical anticorruption training. Continue reading →

Guest Post: Civil Society, Big Ideas, and the 2016 London Anticorruption Summit

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Ben Cowdock of Transparency International UK (TI-UK) contributes the following guest post:

Earlier this year, UK Prime Minister David Cameron gave a speech in Singapore in which he vowed to take a stand against corruption at home and abroad, and announced that London would host an International Anticorruption Summit in 2016. We at TI-UK are optimistic that this summit will provide an expanded opportunity for civil society to contribute, and indeed we are hopeful that we may be entering a period of unprecedented involvement of the wider anticorruption community in the formulation of national and global policy. This would signify an exciting new direction for policymakers—one which the anticorruption community has long advocated. A more open and inclusive process is beneficial for society as a whole; policy is increasingly built on consensus and shared learning, resulting in choosing the right path to tackling corruption.

More concretely, in response to the Prime Minister’s announcement and in preparation for this global summit, Transparency International UK (TI-UK) has been assembling a database of the current “big ideas” on anticorruption policy from the academic, activist, business and policy communities. The database, currently contains over 100 “game-changer” policy proposals (including a number of suggestions put forward and debated on this very blog (such as truth commissions and the potential benefits of expanding UNCAC article 35). To enhance academic, public, and policy awareness of the range of current policy proposals, the database will be published in the near future with full attribution to authors and researchers. We hope this will lead to further debate on which ideas have the potential to significantly improve anti-corruption efforts and deter corruption. We also hope that the summit will provide an opportunity to showcase the growth of “anticorruption hacking”, a collective action phenomenon in which civil society generates pioneering technological approaches to fighting corruption.

The London summit represents a chance for new ideas to come to the fore and be at the heart of UK and global effort against corruption. Civil society has already made a huge contribution in the overwhelming response to TI-UK’s call for big idea policies, which we hope will be influential in shaping the agenda of the summit and demonstrating an international commitment to making a change for the better. If you have any big “game-changing” ideas that you believe would further UK or international anti-corruption efforts, we encourage you to leave an overview in the comment!

Guest Post: Promoting Ambient Accountability with Architecture and Design

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GAB is delighted to welcome back Dieter Zinnbauer, Programme Manager at Transparency International, who contributes the following guest post:

Corrupt transactions do not merely “take place” – they take place in a place, a specific place at a specific time: at customs authorities and land registrars, at hospital wards, police road-stops, school headmaster offices, or the offices of social benefits agencies. The fact that most form of corruption occur in physical locations may seem both obvious and unimportant, but in fact there may be some promising ways to modify the physical settings for government-citizen interactions that would make various kinds of corruption less likely to occur (or easier to detect and remedy). This possibility builds on the observation that many corrupt transactions are fragile forms of social exchange, often involving power asymmetries, established social roles, norms, and expectations. These social dynamics are critical to enabling the parties to engage in an illegal transaction that could get both of them into a lot of trouble. These complex social dynamics and expectations are affected by the physical environment; modifications to that environment can therefore disrupt or alter the social dynamics of a specific situation—creating feelings of empowerment for potential targets of extortion and feelings of uncertainty and anxiety for those who would propose corrupt exchanges.

We should therefore think about ways to use architecture and design to empower citizens to become more aware of their rights and entitlements, to better understand and assess the services they receive, and to register complaints and seek remedies more effectively. I call this concept “ambient accountability.” I have developed this idea more fully in two recent papers (here and here), but here are some concrete examples of how this sort of intervention might work in other contexts: Continue reading →

Guest Post: Why We Should Be Excited About SDG 16

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GAB is delighted to welcome back Daniel Dudis, Senior Policy Director at Transparency International-USA, who contributes the following guest post:

On September 25th, the United Nations adopted the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The SDGs identify development priorities and set measurable targets for progress that are to be met by 2030. They also replace the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), adopted in 2000 and set to expire at the end of this year. The MDGs were aimed primarily at improving living conditions in developing countries, and focused on reducing extreme poverty and improving health, education, sanitation, and nutrition. Unfortunately, progress towards achieving the MDGs has been uneven at best. Notably absent from the MDGs were any commitments on improving governance or reducing corruption. Given that in most countries, government is the primary service provider for healthcare, education, and sanitation, and that government provides nutrition assistance and sets economic policy, the absence of any commitments to improve governance or reduce corruption was a notable blind spot. Honest, accountable, efficient government is the foundation upon which economic development and improved service delivery are built.

Happily, goal 16 of the SDGs fills this lacuna. Goal 16, which seeks to promote just, peaceful, and inclusive societies, includes (among other governance-related targets) significant reductions in illicit financial flows, progress on the recovery and return of stolen assets, and substantial reductions in corruption and bribery.

It is easy to be skeptical about the utility of ambitious international agreements such as the SDGs. Indeed, Matthew’s post last week, which criticized the Goal 16’s anticorruption targets on the grounds that they are ill-suited to quantitative measurement of progress, and Rick’s post yesterday, exemplify that view. Such skepticism, however, is misplaced. The inclusion of these targets in Goal 16 of the SDGs is an important step forward as it represents a clear endorsement by the community of nations that good governance and the fight against corruption are integral parts of the global development agenda. Continue reading →

Guest Post: Pro-Transparency Organizations Fail To Practice What They Preach

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Till Bruckner, freelance journalist and Advocacy Manager for Transparify (an initiative that rates the financial transparency of think tanks and advocacy groups), contributes the following guest post in a private capacity:

“Transparency” is the watchword of the international anticorruption movement, a fact perhaps best illustrated by Transparency International’s choice of name. And partly due to the efforts of TI and many other groups, the world has changed for the better: transparency has become the new norm. Yet many of the anticorruption groups themselves need to wake up to this reality, and become more transparent themselves. Indeed, those of us in the anticorruption community would do a lot better if we started to walk our transparency talk.

This fact was driven home to me in a recent exchange I had with Professor Peter Eigen, the living legend who helped found Transparency International, about his newest venture, the Fisheries Transparency Initiative (FiTI). FiTI aims to curb corruption in international fisheries, and if it works as planned, it could have a positive impact on many issues, including overfishing, food security, and public revenue in developing countries. Somewhat unconventionally, FiTI is financed by the government of Mauritania, whose controversial president, Mohamed Ould Abdel Aziz, first announced the initiative. (see my recent article in Foreign Policy for more background.) I asked Professor Eigen about Mauritania’s financial support for the FiTI; he explained that Mauritania was only sponsoring the initial conceptual phase of FiTI, and he persuasively argued that its government would have no undue influence, let alone control, over outcomes. I then asked Professor Eigen how much Mauritania was paying his organization (the Humboldt-Viadrina Governance Platform) in connection with its work on the FiTI project, but he told me he didn’t want to disclose the figure. He explained:

“This is a normal consulting arrangement of our not-for-profit organization with the [Mauritanian] government. We do not feel it would be proper for us to disclose details of contracts. If media or taxpayers want to find out how [the] Government spends its budget, they can ask the Government. This is for FiTI an unimportant side issue.”

Professor Eigen added two more points. First, his organization would at some later point account for the money on its website. Second, he himself would be working “pro bono.”

Summary: There’s no influence peddling; the use of taxpayer funds is a domestic issue; all money will be accounted for; and nobody is lining their pockets. So, everything is okay, right?

No, it’s not okay at all. Here’s why: Continue reading →

Guest Post: The Blagojevich Case and the Line Between Corruption and Horse-Trading

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Jennifer Rodgers and Jacob Watkins, respectively Executive Director and Program Coordinator for the Columbia University Center for the Advancement of Public Integrity (CAPI), contribute the following guest post:

Former Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich was recently back in the news, but this time for something he didn’t do wrong, when the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals vacated 5 of the 18 counts on which Blagojevich was convicted in 2011. The appellate court’s decision hinged upon the distinction between illegal corruption and legal (if distasteful) political horse-trading, an issue recently touched upon in the decision by the Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit to uphold former Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell’s public corruption convictions (which Matthew discussed here). The outcome of the Blagojevich appeal shows that under current U.S. law, whether or not a public official’s deal-making is illegal depends upon what exactly the official is bargaining for. Political horse-trading–exchanging one official act for another official act–is not a crime under U.S. federal law, but exchanging an official act for a private benefit is. The decision in the Blagojevich provides a useful opportunity for thinking more generally about how the law ought to draw that difficult line. Continue reading →