Africa must tackle insecurity and graft to prosper

The African Peer Review Mechanism was set up to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of governments in delivering goods and services to their citizens and attract investment. As African leaders meet in Nairobi next week, SAMUEL MAKINDA, WAFULA OKUMU and DAVID MICKLER look at what peer review needs to do to achieve its objective

Africa’s chances of turning globalisation into a force “with a human face”, pursuing peace and security and achieving social, economic, and political development are closely linked to good governance.

However, good governance cannot co-exist with rampant corruption. Corruption has taken advantage of the globalisation of markets and is increasingly involving a wide range of activities. These include drugs and arms smuggling, money laundering, the forging of passports (some of which have been used by terrorists) and plundering Africa’s resources including minerals, oil, forestry products and wildlife.

These criminal activities have denied African economies the fuel they need to propel themselves forward. There are, indeed, correlations between corruption and poverty, and between corruption and insecurity, as the situations in Liberia and Sierra Leone demonstrated in the 1990s. In order to make progress on development, the AU and its member states need to tackle corruption by exploiting the complex relations among peace, globalisation, security and governance.

According to John Githongo, a former senior anti-corruption official in Kenya, “corruption — in particular grand corruption and looting of the kind that has tangible economic implications — is at the epicentre of the failure by many African countries to achieve economic objectives so finely articulated in their development plans”.

In a report presented in September 2002, the AU estimated that corruption costs African economies in excess of $148 billion a year. The direct and indirect costs of corruption represent 25 per cent of Africa’s GDP, and often increase the cost of goods by as much as 20 per cent.

These figures hardly tell the whole story; that a huge number of Africans have been denied opportunities for emancipation and empowerment. In a nutshell, corruption has retarded development and, thereby, enhanced the potential for insecurity by weakening state institutions and diverting public resources into private hands, thus undermining indigenous entrepreneurship, scaring away foreign investors, and closing off avenues for human emancipation.

It was against this background that the AU Assembly adopted in July 2003 the Convention on Preventing and Combating Corruption (the anti-corruption convention), which aims at establishing effective measures and actions that prevent, detect, punish and eradicate corruption and related offences. This convention entered into force on August 5, 2006, and had been ratified by 35 countries as of January 2014.

It was supposed to be complemented by the Nepad Action Plan, which calls for setting up a coordinated mechanism to combat corruption. However, this top-down approach to fighting corruption appears to have been aimed at hoodwinking donors and has borne few results, as Transparency International reports indicate.

Moreover, this approach does not appear to take into account the possibility that, in some cases, the state may have become “a vehicle for organised criminal activity”.

Corruption is prevalent in Africa as a result of many factors, including personal greed; the internalisation of bad habits; the misperception that politics is the road to prosperity; weak government structures; ethnic ties and considerations; and the poor remuneration of civil servants.

The plundering of the Congolese, Liberian, and Sierra Leonean economies by Mobutu Sese Seko, Charles Taylor and Foday Sankoh, respectively, was largely the result of personal greed. However, these leaders — who used the state for criminal activities — exploited an atmosphere in which the populace thought it was acceptable to steal from the state. Thus, the people had internalised bad habits.

By the “internalisation of bad habits”, we mean the existence of a culture of corruption that cannot be eliminated by the mere removal of a president, the sacking of a corrupt minister, or the jailing of a corrupt judge/magistrate. Corrupt practices have shaped the identities and interests of individuals and social groups to the extent that some of them cannot tell the difference between right and wrong.

People acquire bad habits through schools, football clubs, social groups and recruitment to political party and government offices. This form of corruption is produced by, and helps to generate, vices such as nepotism, cronyism, patronage and tribalism.

Since independence, aspiring politicians and civil servants have regarded the African state as a “cash cow”. They have reversed Karl Marx’s thesis that it is the economic base that determines political power. In Africa, political office — or a senior civil service position — has served as the road to prosperity for those who occupy them. The desire to exploit the state for personal gain has led to corruption in recruitment processes, the awarding of tenders and the management of parastatal organisations.

According to Jeremy Pope, the founding executive director of Transparency International, most corrupt governments have “a hopelessly corrupt political elite — a political class across the spectrum that simply sees politics as a way of becoming wealthy”. Pope warns that it will be difficult to combat corruption in Africa “as long as politics is seen as the path to wealth”.

AU and Nepad anti-corruption measures

The AU and Nepad have issued blueprints for fighting corruption — the anti-corruption convention and the Nepad Action Plan. However, both documents appear to be predicated on the assumption that African leaders, many of whom still benefit from corruption, will spearhead the fight.

The AU’s anti-corruption convention has the following objectives:

• promoting and strengthening the development of mechanisms to prevent, detect, punish and eradicate corruption and related offences in the public and private sectors;
• promoting, facilitating and regulating cooperation among states effective measures and actions to eradicate corruption and related offences;
• coordinating and harmonising policies and legislation among African states that will eradicate corruption;
• promoting socio-economic development by removing obstacles to the enjoyment of economic, social, cultural, civil and political rights; and
• establishing the necessary conditions to foster transparency and accountability in the management of public affairs.

Nepad’s commitment to good governance is reflected in the African Peer Review Mechanism, an instrument for fostering political, economic and corporate good governance, improving the efficiency and effectiveness of governments in delivering goods and services to their citizens, and creating confidence in target countries to attract support and investment.

The peer review was designed to track the progress and performance of member states in their quest for democracy, human rights, and good governance. It draws its strength from the provision that allows the peer review report to be released publicly, giving citizens a chance to suggest areas that need correction.

Among the indicators on which countries are assessed are their ratification and implementation of international codes — including the AU anti-corruption code — and the enactment and enforcement of effective anti-corruption and anti-money laundering laws.

Of the 31 countries which agreed to undergo the first “peer review” (at the time of writing), 20 had ratified the AU’s anti-corruption convention and 29 had ratified the UN Convention Against Corruption. Yet most of these countries also performed poorly on Transparency International’s list of the “most corrupt countries” in the world.

The peer review has a number of shortcomings. Although it is African leaders who are supposed to review each other’s performances, this function is actually carried out by technical experts, who are themselves governed by an independent panel of seven eminent persons, and the African Peer Review secretariat.

The heads of state and government receive the report prepared by the experts and make recommendations. This is the end of the process; they have no mandate to punish wayward member states. Furthermore, participation in the peer review process is voluntary. So far, 31 countries have acceded to the programme and fewer than half have completed the review.

Even after undergoing the review, there are no indications that the recommendations on dealing with corruption and other governance-related matters will be taken seriously by the country under review.

If fully implemented, the peer review has the potential to be one of the best tools for anticipating and preventing conflicts, but only if its work is taken seriously. To put this into context, the post-election and xenophobic violence that broke out in Kenya and South Africa could have been prevented had the respective governments heeded the warnings.

The top-down approach to tackling corruption proposed by the AU and Nepad has not been tried in any other part of the world. Given the nature of corruption in Africa, this approach is unlikely to succeed.

Moreover, the lukewarm reception to the anti-corruption convention is a clear indication that African leaders, many of them products of corrupt practices, are not ready to dismantle the patron-client political systems that promote corruption.

Corruption is in people’s minds because it has been internalised since childhood. Therefore, it is in the people’s minds that measures to tackle it should start. Just as the consolidation of democracy calls for the promotion of certain values over a period of time, the elimination of corruption requires the dissemination of particular values and norms over a protracted period.

This is not to imply that corruption might not be addressed in other ways. Indeed, some African leaders have taken commendable actions that demonstrate a seriousness about containing corruption, by firing high-ranking officials implicated in the vice.

However, the anti-corruption war cannot be won by firing a few high-ranking officials. Strong leadership must be complemented by a substantial clean-up of the civil service, the dismantling of institutionalised corruption networks, encouragement of a high level of public awareness and citizen participation, and the creation of watchdog groups.

In order for the AU/Nepad anti-corruption measures to be successful, they must be based on a bottom-up strategy. This would entail strengthening national legislation, tightening procedures and audit systems, improving public service performance, developing a culture of outrage, positively encouraging public service integrity, and strengthening governance structures.

Good governance, based on effective mechanisms of public financial management and structures of political accountability, would contain corruption by dismantling patron-client networks.

The AU and Nepad can only play the complementary role of promoting the continental norms of accountability, transparency and good governance. They could also play a role in erecting an anti-corruption architecture composed of CSOs, national anti-corruption bodies, regional economic communities, international anti-corruption agencies and global financial houses.

This strategy would work best if driven by public ownership and a committed political leadership. In other words, the ultimate responsibility for combating and eradicating corruption lies on the shoulders of the people. People need to be educated about their rights and responsibilities.

They need to be made aware of how corruption closes off avenues for their emancipation and empowerment. It is when the people begin to reject corrupt politicians and leaders that the battle to contain corruption can start in earnest.

Samuel M. Makinda is Professor of International Relations and Security Studies at Murdoch University, Perth, Australia. He has published extensively on international relations, international organisation, Africa in the world, human rights, and security.

F. Wafula Okumu is Executive Director of The Borders Institute in Nairobi. He has previously worked at the African Union and has published widely on African borders, democracy, human rights and security.

David Mickler is Assistant Professor in Foreign Policy and International Relations at the University of Western Australia, Perth. He is co-editor of New Engagement: Contemporary Australian Foreign Policy Towards Africa (Melbourne University Press, 2013).

This is an extract from the second edition of their book, The African Union: Addressing the challenges of peace, security and governance published in 2015 by Routledge.