Things are changing and Africa might just be on track to winning war on graft

Rwanda President Paul Kagame drops his ballot paper after voting in a referendum on December 18, 2015, in Kigali. As President Kagame advances a constitutional amendment to seek a third term in office, Western diplomats mutter darkly about the making of yet another African autocrat. PHOTO | CYRIL NDEGEYA | NATION MEDIA GROUP

What you need to know:

  • Civil war is confined mainly to particular regions, but the third, corruption, has been universal, blighting almost every country.
  • In Nigeria, President Muhammadu Buhari has launched a concerted offensive against high-level corruption.
  • In July last year, US President Barack Obama signed a pact to help Kenya in its war on corruption.

To the chagrin of most Africans, the world has long viewed their continent through the prism of the three “Cs” — conflict, contagion, and corruption.

Yet the first two are anything but general.

Civil war is confined mainly to particular regions, but the third, corruption, has been universal, blighting almost every country.

There are, however, encouraging glimmers of change.

Begin in Rwanda. As President Paul Kagame advances a constitutional amendment to seek a third term in office, Western diplomats mutter darkly about the making of yet another African autocrat.

Visit the place, however, and you find a thriving country.

In most of Africa, a traffic stop means a bribe; in Rwanda, both the officer and the motorist would land in jail.

Government institutions work remarkably transparently and the rule of law is real.

Now consider Nigeria, the continent’s largest oil producer.

By some estimates, previous rulers stole some three per cent of the country’s GDP every year.

Now a new leader is rewriting the rules. President Muhammadu Buhari has launched a concerted offensive against high-level corruption.

THE LEADER WE WANT

In November, two top officials were charged in a $2 billion scam to buy fighter jets, helicopters, and ammunition that were never delivered.

In October, a former oil minister and the chief of the national petroleum company were arrested.

Whether such reforms can go deep enough to make a difference depends partly on whether they gain traction elsewhere.

Here, too, there are propitious signs. The president of Benin, also in west Africa, recently apologised after officials made off with a $4 million foreign grant.

And nowhere is drawing as much attention as Tanzania, where newly elected President John Pombe Magufuli has set a rare standard for leadership.

After visiting a hospital where patients lay in corridors, Dr Magufuli downsized an opulent dinner marking the opening of Parliament and spent the money on hospital beds.

He also cancelled independence day celebrations and put the savings into stemming a cholera outbreak.

He banned business-class travel and expensive government retreats, sacked allegedly corrupt senior officials, and began streamlining complicated regulations that crooked bureaucrats exploited to extract hefty bribes.

In East Africa, where Twitter is popular, users are pressing their own governments to act with hashtags like #WhatWouldMagufuliDo?

That question is most salient in Kenya, the face of a rising Africa — and the continent’s third most corrupt country, according to Transparency International.

Every day brings sensational news of mind-boggling plunder: Pens and photocopiers purchased at many multiples of their market price, millions paid out to bogus contractors for phantom services, and state industrial plants simply disappearing — stripped and sold off as scrap by their executives.

FIGHTING GRAFT

Half of a recent $2.5 billion Eurobond issue has reportedly gone missing.

Members of Parliament, among the world’s highest paid, unabashedly pad expenses and take expensive junkets.

The good news is that many of these revelations come from government inspectors and reformers bent on change.

They have been encouraged by President Uhuru Kenyatta, who has launched Kenya’s most ambitious good-governance campaign ever.

Kenyans are sceptical. Corruption is too endemic and the criminal cartels too powerful for brave talk to make a dent.

Yet progress must start somewhere, and now is the moment for Kenya’s international friends to step up.

In July last year, US President Barack Obama signed a pact to help Kenya in its war on corruption.

As with bilateral cooperation to fight terrorism, the pact focuses on illicit financial flows, in addition to the recovery of stolen assets.

The US has since imposed an entry ban on an unspecified number of public officials.

Nigeria’s President Buhari has urged the international community to crack down on the safe havens where corrupt leaders stash stolen wealth.

Freezing the foreign holdings of officials under investigation would be a big step. So would local confiscation of purloined assets.

Most important is ending the culture of impunity. Corruption will never be wiped out in Africa or anywhere else. But it should be an aberration, not an absolute.