Tag Archives: Burkina Faso

ECOWAS Must Get Serious About Corruption—or the Coups Will Continue

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The Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) was founded in 1975 to foster economic cooperation within West Africa. Over time, ECOWAS’s mission has expanded to include the promotion of democracy and political stability. And for a while, it looked like the region was indeed making progress on this front: Between 2015 and 2020, all fifteen ECOWAS member countries were democratic states. But since 2020, West and Central Africa have been hit with a wave of eight military coups, the most recent ones occurring this past July (in Niger) and August (in Gabon). ECOWAS’s response to this democratic backsliding has been unimpressive. For example, ECOWAS looked on passively when, in 2020, both Ivorian President Alassane Ouattara and Guinea’s then-President Alpha Condé ignored or circumvented constitutional limits on their terms. Just this month, Senegal President Macky Sall unilaterally delayed presidential elections for the first time in the nation’s history. Recently, ECOWAS—under pressure from the US and EU—did impose sanctions against Niger in response to the coup, but these sanctions were insufficient to get the coup leaders to step down. In fact, these sanctions were so ineffective that they caused coup-hit Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger to withdraw from the bloc, citing “illegal, illegitimate, inhumane and irresponsible sanctions” and failure to support their fight against “terrorism and insecurity.” All this has begun to jeopardize ECOWAS’s credibility even in the eyes of local populations.

Perhaps more seriously, ECOWAS has lost credibility not only for its response to the coups, but also for its failure to address the root causes of these coups, including not only economic woes, but also endemic corruption. As a coalition of West African civil society organizations recently asserted, ECOWAS operates as “a club of Head of States, whose sole preoccupation is regime protection of the various West African leaders, and their penchant for appropriating the benefits of office to themselves, while the ordinary citizens of countries in the sub-region wallow in extreme poverty, misery, and penury.”

ECOWAS could and should take concrete steps to bolster its waning authority. One of the most effective ways it could do so is by taking a strong stand against corruption. This would not be taking ECOWAS far outside the scope of its existing mandate. The ECOWAS Protocol on the Fight against Corruption authorized ECOWAS to take action “whenever an act of corruption is committed or produces some effects in a State Party.” More generally, given the threat that corruption poses to both democracy and stability, ECOWAS is justified in more decisive action to address this scourge.

In particular, there are three things that ECOWAS ought to do:

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Any Change is Progress? African Citizens Hope the Coups will Leave the Fight against Corruption in Better Hands

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Africa has seen a recent spate of military coups—from Mali to Guinea to Burkina Faso to Niger to Gabon. Most Western powers have condemned these coups. But many Africans have rejoiced, or at least have been far less concerned. For example, a survey conducted shortly after the coup in Niger suggests that most people in four other West African countries (Mali, Ghana, Nigeria, and Ivory Coast) believed that the Niger coup was justified. Why the dissonance between Western and African reactions to these coups?

The answer has to do with the dysfunction and corruption of many nominally “democratic” African governments. Endemic corruption has destroyed public trust in African democracy, and coup leaders have made it clear that corruption is one of the core justifications for their takeovers. Whether this is sincere, a pretext, or a combination, it is clear that the coup leaders are tapping into a sense of genuine public grievance, and that many citizens in these countries have become so frustrated with their elected governments that they would willingly trade electoral democracy for a government with the political will to fight corruption and improve living conditions.

For this reason, it would be an error to see African citizens’ support for these coups as evidence of a turn against genuine democracy. But there is an enormous gap between genuine democracy and the reality of electoral democracy as it exists in many African countries. Westerners who are surprised by African citizens’ support for the recent coups have underestimated just how poorly the corruption of the previous regimes had devastated public trust.

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Adjusting Corruption Perception Index Scores for National Wealth

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My post two weeks ago discussed Transparency International’s newly-released 2017 Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI), focusing in particular on an old hobby-horse of mine: the hazards of trying to draw substantive conclusions from year-to-year changes in any individual country’s CPI score. Today I want to continue to discuss the 2017 CPI, with attention to a different issue: the relationship between a country’s wealth and its CPI score. It’s no secret that these variables are highly correlated. Indeed, per capita GDP remains the single strongest predictor of a country’s perceived corruption level, leading some critics to suggest that the CPI doesn’t really measure perceived corruption so much as it measures wealth—penalizing poor countries by portraying them as more corrupt, when in fact their corruption may be due more to their poverty than to deficiencies in their cultures, policies, and institutions.

This criticism isn’t entirely fair. Per capita income is a strong predictor of CPI scores, but they’re far from perfectly correlated. Furthermore, even if it’s true that worse (perceived) corruption is in large measure a product of worse economic conditions, that doesn’t mean there’s a problem with the CPI as such, any more than a measure of infant mortality is flawed because it is highly correlated with per capita income. (And of course because corruption may worsen economic outcomes, the correlation between wealth and CPI scores may be a partial reflection of corruption’s impact, though I doubt there are many who think that this relationship is so strong that the causal arrow runs predominantly from corruption to national wealth rather than from national wealth to perceived corruption.)

Yet the critics do have a point: When we look at the CPI results table, we see a lot of very rich countries clustered at the top, and a lot of very poor countries clustered at the bottom. That’s fine for some purposes, but we might also be interested in seeing which countries have notably higher or lower levels of perceived corruption than we would expect, given their per capita incomes. As a crude first cut at looking into this, I merged the 2017 CPI data table with data from the World Bank on 2016 purchasing-power-adjusted per capita GDP. After dropping the countries that appeared in one dataset but not the other, I had a 167 countries. I then ran a simple regression using CPI as the outcome variable and the natural log of per capita GDP as the sole explanatory variable. (I used the natural log partly to reduce the influence of extreme income outliers, and partly on the logic that the impact of GDP on perceived corruption likely declines at very high levels of income. But I admit it’s something of an arbitrary choice and I encourage others who are interested to play around with the data using alternative functional forms and specifications.)

This single variable, ln per capita GDP, explained about half of the total variance in the data (for stats nerds, the R2 value was about 0.51), meaning that while ln per capita GDP is a very powerful explanatory variable, there’s a lot of variation in the CPI that it doesn’t explain. The more interesting question, to my mind, concerns the countries that notably outperform or underperform the CPI score that one would predict given national wealth. To look into this, I simply ranked the 167 countries in my data by the size of the residuals from the simple regression described above. Here are some of the things that I found: Continue reading →

Dispatches from the UNCAC Conference of States Parties, Part 1: Revisiting the Jakarta Principles of Anti-Corruption Agencies

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Last month, the UN Convention Against Corruption (UNCAC) Conference of States Parties (COSP) was held in Vienna, Austria. In addition to the formal meetings of government representatives, the COSP also featured a number of panels, speeches, and other side events, at which leading experts discussed and debated a range of anticorruption topics. GAB is delighted that Northwestern Pritzker School of Law Professor Juliet Sorensen and her student Kobby Lartey, who attended the COSP, have offered to share highlights of some of the most interesting sessions in a series of guest posts. Today’s post is the first in that series.

Though specialized anticorruption agencies (ACAs) are dismissed by some as redundant or ineffective, last month’s COSP panel on “Revisiting the Jakarta Principles: Strengthening Anti-Corruption Agencies’ Independence and Effectiveness” made a strong case for ACA’s importance to the fight against corruption. (The Jakarta Principles are drawn from a 2012 statement drafted by anticorruption practitioners and experts from around the world; these broad, aspirational principles help anticorruption to protect themselves, and to offer inspiration for their work.) The panel, which included ACA commissioners from Indonesia, France, Romania, and Burkina Faso, as well as representatives from Transparency International, the UNODC, and UNDP, the panel highlighted the diverse struggles and successes of member states’ ACAs. Continue reading →