Tag Archives: Nigeria

Guest Post: Towards an African Voice on Anticorruption

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Today’s guest post is from Selemani Kinyunyu, Senior Policy Officer for Political and Legal Matters at the African Union Advisory Board on Corruption. The views expressed in this post are his own.

The African Union (AU) has declared the year 2018 is the African Anti-Corruption Year, and the fight against corruption was a central focus of the 31st Summit of the AU, which was held this past July 1 and 2 in Mauritania. The Summit, along with other recent developments, have made clear that there is an emerging African voice on this issue, one that emphasizes certain issues of pressing importance and that articulates a distinctive perspective on these issues. The AU Summit in particular highlighted four notable issues: Continue reading →

Lights, Camera, Integrity? From “Naming and Shaming” to “Naming and Faming”

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“Can a reality TV show discourage corruption?” This was the recent attention-grabbing headline of an article in The Economist about Integrity Idol, the brainchild of the NGO Accountability Labs. It was started in Nepal in 2014, and has since spread to Pakistan, Mali, Liberia, Nigeria, and South Africa.

The format of the show is simple. Citizens are asked to nominate civil servants whom they believe display the highest standards of honesty and integrity. These nominations are then reviewed by a panel of judges comprising local and international experts, who select five finalists. Videos are then produced, each around 2-5 minutes long, containing excerpts from an interview with the finalists and their superiors, colleagues, and subordinates, along with glimpses into their work lives. (See here and here for examples). These videos are disseminated among the citizenry via traditional and non-traditional media. Citizens vote for their favorite, and the “Integrity Idol” is crowned.

This isn’t the first time a non-traditional cultural medium has been used to spread an anticorruption message. Other approaches, including museums, TV dramas, music, and poetry  have been discussed on this blog previously (see here, here, here and here). Thanks to Integrity Idol, reality TV can be added to the list. That might seem a bit surprising. Reality TV has a (deserved) reputation for depicting an over-dramatized, intentionally provocative, and often manipulated caricature of real life. One hopes that no one would cite Real Housewives of New York as a reliable source for understanding the lives of real housewives in New York! Integrity Idol is different: it is an intentional effort to draw attention to real stories of real people, and often the unaltered stories of these people are compelling in and of themselves. The vision of Accountability Labs and its founding director, Blair Glencorse, is to “support change-makers to develop and implement positive ideas for integrity in their communities, unleashing positive social and economic change.” Continue reading →

Fighting Corruption in Nigeria

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Nigeria continues to enjoy pride of place in the global discourse on corruption.  A Google search for “Nigeria corruption” brings up more than 53 million entries led by a lengthy Wikipedia article on the subject. Matthew’s bibliography lists over 100 books, monographs, and scholarly articles on corruption in the country which analyze everything from its colonial roots to how and why it is endemic to what can be done to tame it.  This blog has ruminated on matters ranging from why the head of the Economic and Financial Crime Commission was replaced to whether the then newly-elected President Muhammadu Buhari was serious about fighting corruption to outgoing First Lady Patience Jonathan’s impatience with the thought something was untoward in her receiving “small gifts” totaling $15 million while her husband held high office.

Two current papers by authors with very different backgrounds, one a former U.S. intelligence analyst, the other a former Nigerian professor and incoming head of the Nigeria’s corrupt practices commission, continue the discussion.   Both agree corruption is pervasive and that it has done much harm to the state and its citizens.  Not surprisingly perhaps, given who they are and where they sit, they offer quite different assessments of where the country stands in the fight against corruption.  In Real Challenges of Fighting Corruption in Nigeria, remarks delivered to the Corruption Hunters Network (CHN) June 25, Professor Bolaji Owasanoye, nominated to chair the Independent Corrupt Practices and Other Related Offences Commission, radiated optimism, ticking off a series of reforms that have made a difference and predicting more progress is on the horizon.  By contrast, the tone of a July monograph for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace by Matthew Page, the former Nigerian analyst for the U.S. intelligence community, is decidedly pessimistic.  When it comes to what can be done, he offers nothing beyond a scheme to help policymakers make sense of the dizzying variety of forms corruption in the country takes.

My money is on Owasanoye and not just because I had the opportunity to hear him deliver his talk. My reasons for optimism about Nigeria’s fight against corruption are several. Continue reading →

Guest Post: Global Forum or Global Farce on Asset Recovery?

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GAB is delighted to welcome back Susan Hawley, Policy Director at Corruption Watch, to contribute today’s guest post:

The global record on recovering assets looted from public treasuries is not good. The World Bank and UNODC estimate that between $20-40 billion is stolen each year. Between 2006 and 2012, $2.6 billion stolen assets were frozen in so-called “destination” countries, and $423.5 million was returned. That means of the roughly $120 billion (taking the lowest end of the World Bank and UNODC’s estimate) thought to have been potentially looted globally in that 6 year period, only 0.3% was actually recovered.

To strengthen international efforts to combat this problem, the 2016 London Anti-Corruption Summit called for the creation of a Global Forum on Asset Recovery (GFAR); the World Bank and UNODC’s Stolen Asset Recovery Initiative organized the inaugural Global Forum on Asset Recovery (GFAR), in December 2017 in Washington, D.C., with the US and UK governments as co-hosts. The GFAR, which welcomed over 300 participants from 26 jurisdictions, focused on four countries: Nigeria, (thought to have to have lost $32 billion to corruption under previous President Goodluck Jonathan); Sri Lanka (where former President Rajapaksa allegedly stole up to $5.38 billion); Tunisia (where former ruler Ben Ali and his family are thought to have amassed wealth of over $13 billion); and Ukraine (where former president Yanukovych and his associates are thought to have stolen around $7.5 billion). These countries were selected for their political will to recover stolen assets and the considerable assets they have to recover.

The stated objectives for the GFAR were “progress on cases achieved by the four focus countries, increased capacity through technical sessions, renewed commitment to advancing asset recovery cases, and increased collaboration among involved jurisdictions.” As measured against these objectives, was the GFAR a success? Should it be a regular event? More generally, do asset recovery forums like this have sufficient positive impact to justify their cost? Continue reading →

A Dangerous Retreat from Anticorruption Aid

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The US government’s drive to cut foreign aid in favor of increased military spending is shortsighted, even if one focuses only on national security objectives. This is especially true for aid devoted to supporting anticorruption efforts, which can act as a powerful tool for improving regional stability without direct, overbearing involvement in a region. The past decade has shown how difficult on-the-ground involvement can be, and anticorruption-focused aid can help secure dangerous regions and allow the US to withdraw some of it physical presence abroad.

One striking example of the danger that corruption poses to security and stability can be seen in the context of land use and land rights. When corrupt officials deprive people of their land, destroying both their livelihoods and often their local communities in one move, they may push those affected into a situation where violence may seem like the only option. For example, recent land seizures in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq—with Kurdish members of the community either relying on tribal connections or direct bribery to convince local judges to push through illegal land transfers—have caused an outcry among the primarily Christian and Yazidi victims and partially contributed to the formation of religious minority militia units that now threaten to create more violence if they cannot return to their seized homelands. Similar pairings of violence following land seizures were also found in Zimbabwe in the early 2000s. And in Afghanistan, corrupt land seizures have been a consistent issue throughout the past decade. This danger remains a concern not just for those affected, but for the international community, as violent movements can lead to destabilization. Continue reading →

Transparency International’s Anti-Corruption Pledge Tracker Is Badly Flawed. It Needs To Be Redone from Scratch.

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In May 2016, at the London Anticorruption Summit sponsored by then-Prime Minister David Cameron, participating countries issued declarations announcing a variety of commitments—some new, some continuations of existing policies—to further the fight against international corruption. Of course, all too often governments fail to follow through on their grandiose promises, so I was heartened by Transparency International’s announcement, in September 2016, that it had gone through all the country declarations, compiled a spreadsheet identifying each country’s specific promises, and would be monitoring how well each country was following through on its commitments.

Last month, a year after TI published the spreadsheet documenting the list of summit commitments, TI released a report and an interactive website that purport to track whether countries have followed through on those commitments. So what do we learn from this tracking exercise?

Alas, the answer is “almost nothing.” TI’s “Anti-Corruption Pledge Tracker,” in its current form, is a catastrophic failure—a slapdash, amateurish collection of arbitrary, often inconsistent judgments, unsupported by anything that resembles serious research, and (ironically) non-transparent. This is all the more surprising—and disappointing—given the fact that TI has done so much better in producing similar assessment tools in other contexts. Indeed, at least one such recent tool—TI’s Government Defense Anti-Corruption Index—provides a model for what the Pledge Tracker could and should have looked like. Given the importance of tracking countries’ fulfillment of their summit pledges, and TI’s natural position as a leader on that effort, I dearly hope that TI will scrap the Pledge Tracker in its current form, go back to the drawing board, and do a new version.

I know that sounds harsh, and perhaps it seems excessive. But let me explain why I don’t find the Pledge Tracker, in its current form, worthy of credence. Continue reading →

Tanzania’s President Magufuli Bulldozes the Civil Service: Is This an Anticorruption Breakthrough?

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For decades (perhaps longer), the corruption problem in Sub-Saharan Africa has seemed intractable. With only a handful of exceptions (such as Botswana, and more recently Rwanda), Sub-Saharan African countries score poorly on measures like Transparency International’s Corruption Perception Index (CPI), and direct surveys of African citizens tend to confirm that the frequency of petty bribery, while both lower and more variable than some Westerners think, are much higher than in most other countries. Declarations of war on corruption have also been a feature of African politics for decades, to the point where both citizens themselves and outside observers have grown cynical about the will or capacity of leaders to clean up the system.

But there are some preliminary, hopeful signs that in at least some major Sub-Saharan countries, things may be starting to change for the better. The country that probably gets the most attention, at least among commentators outside of Africa, seems to be Nigeria, where President Buhari—a former strongman-style President whom some have characterized as a kind of “born-again” reformer—has made anticorruption a centerpiece of both his election campaign and his administration. (For some discussions of President Buhari’s anticorruption efforts, on this blog and elsewhere, see here, here, here, and here.) But to me—as a non-expert with only the most superficial knowledge of the region or its politics—the more interesting developments are actually occurring in Tanzania, under the administration of President John Magufuli. Continue reading →