Tag Archives: Guinea

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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The Disease of Corruption: How Distrust in Corrupt Governments Impacts Emergency Health Delivery

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Corruption negatively impacts health outcomes. As noted in a previous post, corruption is associated with higher infant, child, and maternal mortality, overall poor health, the spread of antibiotic resistance, and many other problems. When we consider the reasons why corruption undermines health, the most obvious include things like theft or diversion of healthcare resources, or how demands for extra “informal” payments to healthcare providers can deprive poor communities of adequate care. There is, however, another important mechanism through which corruption undermines public health: corruption undermines trust in government and government-run services, which in turn can hinder effective health delivery and thereby escalate the spread of infectious diseases, especially in emergency situations like the recent Ebola crisis. Continue reading →

“Charitable Giving” — A Way Around the FCPA? Part II

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In a December post I asked readers how they would rule in an FCPA-related case recently before U.S. federal trial judge Melinda Harmon.  As judge Harmon was required to do when deciding the case, readers were asked to assume the following was true:  The chief executive of Hyperdynamics Corporation, a Houston-based oil exploration company, had established “American Friends of Guinea,” an NGO, in 2006 after the Guinean government had threatened to revoke the company’s oil concession, its sole asset; and shortly after “Friends” was created, the government approved a renegotiated concession.  In 2007, when the government again threatened its concession, “Friends” made a substantial contribution of medicines to care for Guineans stricken with cholera, and in 2009, after the government again reaffirmed the concession, Hyperdynamics donated company stock to “Friends.”  Finally, in 2011 the firm itself gave government ministries some $30,000 worth of computer equipment.

Well, readers, what do you think?  Do the above allegations, if true, state a plausible violation of the FCPA?  That is, could a reasonable jury, or judge sitting as a finder of facts, infer from them that one or more of the donations was actually a bribe Hyperdynamics paid to Guinean government officials in return for allowing it keep its oil concession? Continue reading →

Guinean, American Anticorruption Investigators Tear Up the “Best Private Mining Deal of Our Generation”

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The mining mogul Benny Steinmetz was once feted for the “best private mining deal of our generation,” after his company secured Africa’s richest iron ore deposit in Simandou, Guinea. Today, the deal “lies in ruins.” A two-year investigation by Guinea’s government has found that Steinmetz’s firm BSGR used corrupt practices to win its mining rights from Ahmed Sekou Touré, Guinea’s former dictator, . The company has now been stripped of these rights. Meanwhile, the FBI has Steinmetz on tape authorizing millions of dollars in payments to the wife of a former Guinean dictator. A BSGR associate, Frederic Cilins, has pled guilty to obstructing an FCPA inquiry into the mining deal in a Manhattan court; Swiss prosecutors are looking to question Steinmetz himself. Perhaps unbelievably for Benny Steinmetz, anticorruption authorities around the world have responded furiously to a clandestine deal in an overlooked, West African backwater.

Four takeaways from these incredible developments, after the jump.

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