By MURITHI MUTIGA
Posted Saturday, December 31 2011 at 15:51
Posted Saturday, December 31 2011 at 15:51
IN SUMMARY
- Reboot: Until the nation manages to “reboot its software”–as John Githongo puts it, who heads the anti-corruption commission will be totally irrelevant
Like a chicken that continues to race around the compound long after its head has been chopped off, the anti-corruption agency in Africa is a body that has simply refused to accept its irrelevance and shuffle off the stage.
These commissions were brought to Africa about a decade ago by the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and assorted donors who were rightly concerned that their taxpayers’ money should not be used to line the pockets of those in power.
The problem is that the remedy they came up with, represented here by the Kenya Anti-Corruption Commission, in South Africa by the Scorpions Unit and in Nigeria by the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, proved to be as completely ineffective as the Structural Adjustment Programmes cooked up by even more naive donors in the 1990s.
There are many reasons why these agencies have turned out to be a complete waste of time, energy and resources.
The most prominent is their design. In almost all cases, the heads of these agencies are appointed directly by the president, or in the case of Kenya’s proposed new anti-graft agency, through a process culminating in a parliamentary vote.
In other words, they are designed to fail. Because politicians know they will be the main targets of inquiries into corruption, requiring them to nominate an effective head of an anti-graft agency is like expecting prisoners on death row to vote for a sharpshooter as executioner.
Politicians will always nominate whomever they think is the least effective person to head an anti-graft agency. This fundamental design flaw is the reason these agencies in Africa lasted only a few years before they ran aground.
In South Africa, the Scorpions shone brightly before the African National Congress had had enough of its own anti-corruption crusade and disbanded them.
Jacob Zuma showed just how much independence he expected from their successor the Special Investigations Unit when he picked his former legal adviser to head the agency.
In Nigeria, the much-celebrated head of the EFCC Nuhu Ribadu enjoyed much international acclaim before the executive–once again–had had enough and fired him.
The Kenyan experience with the anti-corruption commission borders on farce. It is lavishly financed by taxpayers, but the return on the money spent on it has been very mediocre despite what you will hear from its PR team.
One of the few studies conducted on the efficacy of KACC was done by the watchdog Mars Group which examined the agency’s annual report for 2005/6 to determine whether Kenyans were getting value for money.
Their report concluded (surprise, surprise) that “prominent personalities (were) more likely to benefit from a recommendation by KACC to close their files than less prominent public officers” and that “for incomprehensible reasons major grand corruption cases which have captured public attention” were completely missing from the KACC report.
Instead, there were numerous cases involving petty corruption including a council askari arrested for demanding a bribe of Sh500 to unclamp a complainant’s motor vehicle and a chief in Kahawa West who wanted Sh4,000 not to demolish a business shed.
Given this record of failure, it is an embarrassment that we continue to see an anti-graft agency as the keystone in the war against corruption.
Kenya would be far better served by fundamental institutional reforms that eliminate the leeway for corruption by public officials.
Digitising land records and case files in the Judiciary, for example, would reduce the wiggle room of the court clerk who claims the file is missing before it magically reappears after lunch is offered. This is what former Soviet republics like Estonia have done with great success.
In the end, however, corruption will only be meaningfully reduced by tackling what Kenya faces, which is a crisis of values.
Until the nation manages to “reboot its software”–as John Githongo puts it–and gets its citizens to value enterprise and hard work as the path to wealth and success, who heads the anti-corruption commission will be totally irrelevant.
mmutiga@ke.nationmedia.com
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment