Nathaniel
Still curious about Cameroon’s PR initiative in last week’s Washington Post (see our previous post, “Cameroon’s War on Corruption: Reality or Good PR?"), we decided to do some additional digging into the ad. Thanks to the pre-World War II-era Foreign Agents Registration Act, all foreign governments lobbying the U.S. government or seeking to influence U.S. public opinion are required to file extensive paperwork and regular reports about such activities with the U.S. Department of Justice. Far more rigorous than U.S. domestic lobbying disclosures and finally available online after years of having to camp out in an awful office on New York Avenue to access the files, here’s what we found.
Among other blue chip lobbyists and PR firms retained over the years by the government of Cameroon (Burson-Marsteller and Patton Boggs among them), we found a recent contract between the Government of Cameroon and GoodWorks International (GWI), an Atlanta-based consulting firm which provides “comprehensive range of public affairs and communications services designed to strengthen [the] presence [of developing nations] in Washington.”
Although headquartered outside of Washington, GWI is an otherwise classic “revolving door” lobbying shop: a slew of former ambassadors, executive branch officials, and even a former Prime Minister of Jamaica are among its top officials.
The GWI contract with the Cameroonian Minister of Economy and Finance, signed in July 2007, details a “strategy for securing a Compact under the Millennium Challenge Account […] in as little as 12-18 months [by raising] some of the negative indicators that now make the country ineligible.” The contract also stipulates that “GWI will assist the Cameroonian authorities to devise a communications strategy to show-case Cameroon’s reform efforts.” Now, two weeks before the contract is due to expire, with a Compact yet to be achieved, the ad appeared in last week’s Post.
A number of interesting questions come to mind. First, how common is this sort of perverse “MCC effect” among developing countries seeking big MCC dollars? Instead of comitting to genuine governance reforms, as the MCC process is intended to operate, the government of Cameroon seems more interested in influencing elite opinion in Washington as a way of moving the needle on MCC’s indicators.
A second, slightly scarier question: is Cameroon so wrong in that approach? The indicator used by the MCC to measure a country’s progress on anti-corruption has come under increasing fire in recent years as “unactionable” -- in layman’s terms, there is sometimes little that a government can do to affect the scores given that the indicator is built on a messy aggregation of disparate opinion polls, expert assessments (full disclosure: including Global Integrity data), and household and firm surveys. With so much fuzzy data floating around, is it any wonder governments are turning to a far more tried and true inside-the-Beltway technique to secure MCC funding?
At a cost of “only” $350,000 a year – the price of Cameroon’s annual retainer with GWI – perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised when hundreds of millions of MCC dollars are at stake.
View the GWI contract here.
-- By Julia Burke and Nathaniel Heller
Tuesday, July 8, 2008
Cameroon’s War on Corruption: Probably Good PR
Thursday, July 3, 2008
Cameroon’s War on Corruption: Reality or Good PR?
Yesterday’s Washington Post featured a half page advertisement summarizing Cameroon’s renewed effort towards “Vigorous, Committed Reform.” The ad, sponsored by Cameroonian President Paul Biya, detailed numerous measures recently implemented to “consolidate the rule of law and to fight corruption” following Transparency International’s 1998 and 1999 reports naming Cameroon as the most corrupt nation in the world. We thought it would be interesting to compare the claims in the ad against our recent 2007 assessment of Cameroon.
The 2007 Integrity Indicators Scorecard for Cameroon both confirms and debunks several of the points advanced in the ad. One of those concerns the new 2006 penal code, touted as evidence of progress on anti-corruption and rule of law. On our assessment, Cameroon indeed earned a rating of “very strong” and a score of “100” for anti-corruption law, recognizing several of the penal code’s more progressive features. However, the Global Integrity score for the performance of Cameroon’s anti-corruption agency was “very weak” (53 out of 100), with our experts noting that the agency existed but had not yet proven itself effective in combating corruption or protecting the rule of law. As some of our peer reviewers alluded to, the government may not be truly committed to the full implementation of the sweeping reforms called for in the 2006 code, despite the rhetoric.
The ad goes on to describe a renewed commitment to increased transparency of public financial management, including “stepped up efforts to improve the quality of public spending” and “progressive measures […] such as [public disclosure] of a summary of investments.” While investments made with public funds may indeed be more transparent than in the past, the 2007 Integrity Indicators note that the disclosure of private investments on the part of public officials that could pose conflicts of interests remains virtually non-existent across the executive, legislative, and judicial branches, contributing to a “very weak” government accountability rating.
The 2007 Cameroon Reporter’s Notebook succinctly summarizes the conditions for average citizens on the ground and posits that the government’s newfound enthusiasm for anti-corruption efforts may not be so much “spontaneous political will” as the result of “international pressure.” Still, if the reforms heralded in the ad were to be fully implemented, there could at least be a chance of lasting reforms actually being achieved.
-- By Julia Burke