Tag Archives: Nigeria

Can U.S. Efforts To Fight Vote Buying Offer Lessons for Others?

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Vote buying—the practice of providing or promising cash, gifts, jobs, or other things of value to voters to induce them to support a candidate in an election—is illegal in 163 countries, yet it is a widespread and seemingly intractable problem in many parts of the developing world. In Ghana, for example, incumbents distribute outboard motors to fishermen and food to the rural electorate. In the Philippines, politicians distribute cash and plum short-term jobs. In 2015, Nigerian incumbents delivered bags of rice with images of the president ahead of the election. And Werner Herzog’s 2010 documentary film Happy People shows a politician cheerfully delivering dried goods along with musical entertainment to an utterly isolated village of trappers in Siberia (49 minutes into the film). Thus, recent instances of vote buying are more varied than the simple cash for vote exchange; they include awarding patronage jobs and purposefully targeting social spending as a reward for political support.

Vote buying not only distorts the outcomes of elections, but it also hurts the (usually poor) communities where this practice is rampant. It might be tempting to say that at least those who sell their votes receive something from their government, but in fact, once these citizens are bought off, their broader interests are left out of the government’s decision-making process, as the incentive to provide public goods to that group disappears. A study in the Philippines, for example, found that vote buying correlates with lower public investments in health and higher rates of malnourishment in children.

While some commentators occasionally (and condescendingly) suggest that vote buying is a product of non-Western political norms and expectations, this could not be further from the truth. Although wealthy democracies like the United States today experience very little crude vote buying, vote buying in the U.S. was once just as severe as anything we see today in the developing world. In fact, during George Washington’s first campaign for public office in 1758, he spent his entire campaign budget on alcohol in an effort to woo voters to the polls. By the 19th century, cash and food occasionally supplemented the booze, particularly in times of depression. Even as late as 1948, a future president won his senate campaign through vote buying and outright fraud.

Yet while U.S. politics today is certainly not corruption-free (see here, here, and here), it has managed to (mostly) solve the particular problem of vote buying. Does the relative success of certain U.S. efforts hold any lessons for younger democracies? One must always be cautious in drawing lessons from the historical experience of countries like the U.S. for modern postcolonial states, both because the contexts are quite different and because suggesting that other countries can learn from the U.S. experience can sometimes come off as patronizing. Nevertheless, certain aspects of the United States’ historical strategy to combat vote buying might be relevant to those countries struggling with the problem today. Let me highlight a few of them: Continue reading →

Nigeria’s Former First Lady: Stop Attacking Me for Gifts I Received

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Ex-Nigerian First Lady Patience Jonathan’s patience is being tested by a campaign of calumny being waged against her.  Since her husband left office in 2015 she has been under constant attack merely because she recieved some small gifts from friends and well-wishers while her husband served in government.   The Nigerian NGO Socio-Economic Rights and Accountability Project is trying to force the authorities to open a criminal case against her and the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, Nigeria’s anticorruption agency, wants to seize the gifts.

It is easy to see why the attacks are testing Patience’s patience.  The gifts were all small, some as little as $800, and altogether they total just $15 million.  Moreover, as she has repeatedly explained, she had nothing to do with the money being deposited into bank accounts in someone else’s name.  An assistant did that without telling her, and in any event why does it matter?  She was the only one authorized to write checks on the account.

Thankfully for the former first lady, members of the Union of Niger Delta Youth Organisation for Equity, Justice and Good Governance have come to her defense.  In a complaint filed in early October for themselves and Mrs. Jonathan the group asked the Federal High Court in Lagos to enjoin the NGO SERAP from “taking any further steps in further vilification, condemnation and conviction of the Former First Lady Mrs Dame Patience Jonathan . . . and in the use of the judicial process for that purpose by the extremely publicized pursuit of any application for the coercion of the Attorney General of the Federation to prosecute the Plaintiff/Applicant for owning legitimate private property . . . .”  The group’s complaint seeking the injunction against SERPA goes on to detail just how unjust the criticism of Dame Patience is – Continue reading →

Guest Post: 43 Government Reps Walked Into a Summit…. What Next?

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Maggie Murphy, Senior Global Advocacy Manager for Transparency International, contributes the following guest post:

International summits come and go, and all too often the promises made at these summits are quickly forgotten, lost in an online catacomb or otherwise hard to track. We at Transparency International are determined that the commitments made by government representatives at last May’s London Anticorruption Summit (648 total commitments by 41 of the 43 participating governments) must not slide into oblivion in this way. That’s why, as Matthew announced in a post earlier this month, we’ve gone through every single country statement and compiled all commitments into one central database, sortable by country, theme, and region. Our goal is for this database to be used by anticorruption advocates and activists to monitor what their countries have committed to, and whether and where they are making progress.

We’ve done our own preliminary analysis of the commitments, assessing the extent to which each commitment is (1) “concrete” (i.e measurable), (2) “new” (i.e., generated by the Summit), and (3) “ambitious” (according to country partners). We found that more than half of the commitments were concrete, about a third were brand new, and about a third seen to be ambitious by our country partners. That’s encouraging, and certainly better than I would have expected.

We’ve put together a more formal analysis here, including a description of how we came to our conclusions. Let me highlight some of the most interesting ones: Continue reading →

Due Process and its Discontents: Nigeria’s Case Against Sambo Dasuki Encounters an Unwelcome (but Necessary) Hurdle

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Just over a year ago, Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari took office. He had run on a platform of anticorruption and military reform and, while I wanted to be hopeful, I expressed measured skepticism that he would be able to make substantial headway on either issue. For all he has received his fair share of criticism over the past year, President Buhari has made considerable efforts to tackle corruption, including graft in the military. In addition to advancing somewhat controversial legal reforms aimed at whistleblower protection and anti-money laundering, among other things, the Buhari administration has stepped up prosecution of high-level officials for corruption-related crimes.

The most prominent case is that of Colonel Mohammed Sambo Dasuki, who served as former President Goodluck Jonathan’s National Security Adviser from 2012 to 2015. Following an investigation into arms procurement under the Jonathan administration, authorities arrested Dasuki in late 2015 and indicted him on numerous counts of fraud and money laundering. The initial investigation by the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC), one of Nigeria’s anticorruption units, uncovered evidence that Dasuki had orchestrated a fraudulent $2 billion arms deal and had engaged in other criminally corrupt activity. The charging documents accuse Dasuki of funneling state funds to politicians of the former ruling party, real estate developers, consultants, and religious leaders. The money had been intended to purchase helicopters and military planes for the fight against Boko Haram, the terrorist group responsible for the death of thousands and the displacement of millions in northern Nigeria. The purported criminal conduct involved high-profile co-conspirators, including former Minister of Finance Bashir Yuguda and former governor of Sokoto State Attahiru Dalhatu Bafarawa. If the alleged facts are true, Dasuki and his accomplices are guilty of heinous crimes.

Given the severity – and plausibility – of the purported misconduct, I was not shocked to see that the case had reached the ECOWAS Court of Justice – a regional body with jurisdiction over human rights abuses committed by Member States. I was shocked to see that Dasuki was the complainant, and that the Court of Justice had issued a preliminary ruling in his favor. Upon taking a step back, though, I realized that the Court of Justice ruling is not outrageous; in fact, it has sent a critically important message to the Nigerian government that respecting the rule of law is just as important as convicting corrupt officials.

Continue reading →

London Anticorruption Summit–Country Commitment Scorecard, Part 2

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This post is the second half of my attempt to summarize the commitments (or lack thereof) in the country statements of the 41 countries that attended last week’s London Anticorruption Summit, in four areas highlighted by the Summit’s final Communique:

  1. Increasing access to information on the true beneficial owners of companies, and possibly other legal entities, perhaps through central registers;
  2. Increasing transparency in public procurement;
  3. Strengthening the independence and capacity of national audit institutions, and publicizing audit results (and, more generally, increasing fiscal transparency in other ways); and
  4. Encouraging whistleblowers, strengthening their protection from various forms or retaliation, and developing systems to ensure that law enforcement takes prompt action in response to whistleblower complaints.

These are not the only subjects covered by the Communique and discussed in the country statements. (Other topics include improving asset recovery mechanisms, facilitating more international cooperation and information sharing, joining new initiatives to fight corruption in sports, improving transparency in the extractive sector through initiatives like the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative, additional measures to fight tax evasion, and several others.) I chose these four partly because they seemed to me of particular importance, and partly because the Communique’s discussion of these four areas seemed particularly focused on prompting substantive legal changes, rather than general improvements in existing mechanisms.

Plenty of others have already provided useful comprehensive assessments of what the country commitments did and did not achieve. My hope is that presenting the results of the rather tedious exercise of going through each country statement one by one for the language on these four issues, and presenting the results in summary form, will be helpful to others out there who want to try to get a sense of how the individual country commitments do or don’t match up against the recommendations in the Communique. My last post covered Afghanistan–Malta; today’s post covers the remaining country statements, Mexico–United States: Continue reading →

When Should Governments Keep Stolen Assets?

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The Swiss government agreed in early March to return $321 million to the Nigerian government that was stolen by the late Sanni Abacha during his kleptocratic reign as the country’s president.   The agreement provides that the funds will be used for programs to benefit the Nigerian people in “an efficient and accountable way” and, to ensure the funds do indeed go to such programs, the World Bank will monitor their use.

World Bank oversight is one way to ensure returned assets are not again stolen, and in the case of Nigeria — a relatively open society with an elected government, a lively, unconstrained media, and a vibrant civil society – World Bank monitoring, when coupled with these conditions, may be sufficient to guarantee the funds are put to good use.  But what about in closed societies?  Those without elections, free media, an independent civil society.  Countries where the same tight-knit, authoritarian group which stole the assets in the first place remains in power?  Is there any way to ensure stolen assets returned to these countries will be used to benefit the nation’s citizens rather than going straight back into the pockets of the thieves? Continue reading →

An Inside Perspective on the Replacement of the Head of Nigeria’s Economic and Financial Crimes Commission

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As many readers will know, on Monday, November 9, Ibrahim Lamorde stepped down as head of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, the country’s principal anti-corruption agency.  Although initial reports say Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari fired him, Presidential spokesperson Femi Adesina denies this was the case. Adesina explained that the President had decided not to re-appoint Lamorde, a career member of the Nigerian police force, to a second term when his current one expires this February and that his leaving the EFCC now is in accordance with procedures governing the rotation of career government employees.

Controversy over the tenure of the EFCC is nothing new.  The “reassignment” of its first chief, Nuhu Ribadu, for the flimsiest of reasons was a response by Nigeria’s corrupt class to a far too aggressive investigator.  Rumors why Lamorde is leaving point in the opposite direction, the claim being he was let go because he had been going too easy on the gaggle of corrupt businesses and politicians stealing so much of the national patrimony.

GAB asked a close observer of Nigerian politics for his take.  He writes: Continue reading →

Guest Post: Fishing for the Right ACA Heads, and Keeping Them Safe

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Sofie Arjon Schütte, Senior Advisor at the U4 Anti-Corruption Resource Centre, contributes the following guest post, adapted from her recent U4 research paper, “The fish’s head: appointment and removal procedures for anti-corruption agency leadership”:

There has been much discussion on this blog (see here, here, and here) about the requirements for an effective, independent anticorruption agency (ACA). A number of factors are important, including (as emphasized in the Jakarta Statement) the ACA’s mandate, permanence, budget security, autonomy over financial and human resources, and internal and external accountability mechanisms, to name a few. But among the many important factors, the procedures for appointment and removal are particularly critical. As the saying goes, “a fish rots from the head down”: when the leadership of an organization is unethical or ineffective, these failings infect the entire organization. Undue external interference with an ACA is likely to target the head, and a co-opted or corrupted ACA head can do serious damage to the effectiveness and reputation of the ACA.

My research on the appointment and removal procedures for heads of 46 ACAs around the world has highlighted some of the important factors that can promote or undermine effective, ethical, and independent ACA leadership. Given different contexts, no specific set of procedures for appointments and removals can be considered ideal for all environments. Nevertheless, some general guidelines are possible: Continue reading →

Anticorruption Co-opted: Problems with the Purported Polygamy-Corruption Connection

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Whether or not a country’s culture can be blamed for causing corruption has come up on the blog before.  This question comes up in a great variety of contexts, but one that may be less familiar to many readers is the purported causal link between polygamy and corruption. Polygamy has been called a “breeding ground” for corruption, and blamed for the spread of corruption in, for example, South Africa, Ghana, Nigeria, and South Sudan. But the empirical evidence to support this claim is very weak. Given that weakness, it’s somewhat puzzling why the claim has gotten so much traction in some quarters. This may be one of those cases where the alleged link between a cultural practice (here, polygamy) and corruption is motivated less by a concern about corruption, and more by objections to–and deep social clashes over–the cultural practice. Corruption, in other words, may be a stalking horse for other concerns. Continue reading →

Not My Neighbor’s Keeper: Military Corruption and International Peacekeeping

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There are few more troubling examples of how corruption can both create and sustain violent conflict than the current crisis in Nigeria. As Liz emphasized in a recent post, many observers believe that rampant corruption may have contributed to the rise of Boko Haram, and may also be one of the primary reasons for the Nigerian military’s difficulty in combating the threat posed by this group. While Liz focused on the reasons why it might be particularly difficult to combat corruption in the Nigerian military, I would like to take up a different issue: the ways in which military corruption is currently perceived and addressed by members of the international community.

The dichotomy between the treatment of certain instances of military corruption, and the international community’s perception of the problems posed by this phenomenon, is perhaps best illustrated by the coverage that two different examples of military corruption have received in recent months. First, as mentioned above, coverage of the role that military corruption has played in Nigeria’s ability to ward off Boko Haram and its potential impact upon the surrounding region has been widespread.  Second, the Chinese government has released the names of 14 generals in the People’s Liberation Army suspected of corruption – a move that has been seen as part of a broader anticorruption effort by the new regime and that has been justified, at least in part, by the fact that these officials’ corruption has potentially undermined the “military readiness” of Chinese forces. This development has been largely viewed as a purely domestic concern for China and received relatively little news coverage.  Yet, while the treatment of these two events by the international community may differ dramatically, the root of both of these problems – military corruption – is the same.

It is not particularly surprising that the problems posed by military corruption in China and Nigeria have been treated differently by outside commentators. After all, the threat posed by Boko Haram is a serious one, with potentially significant import for international security. However the fact that there can be such a swift change between a situation in which rampant military corruption can be categorized best as simply a “local concern” – an absence of military readiness amongst a state’s armed forces or too many supplies gone missing – and instances, such as those in Nigeria, in which military corruption in one state can implicate the security of an entire region suggests, perhaps, that there may be some merit in reframing how we think about the phenomenon of military corruption.

Continue reading →