Nathaniel
A new paper analyzes the performance of the African Peer Review Mechanism, as experienced in Kenya.
From the NED email newsletter:In a recent position paper on the current political crisis in Kenya, Bronwen Manby, Senior Programme Advisor with AfriMap at the Open Society Institute, discusses what can be learned from both the successes and failures of the African Peer Review Mechanism (APRM) country review report on Kenya presented during the July 2006 African Summit. The author argues that observations made at the time regarding the political climate are just as valid today as they were then. Areas of concern noted by the APRM in 2006 include the role of prominent members of the ruling party and high ranking government officials in fuelling ethnic clashes, corruption regarding land allocation, economic and social inequality, and an implementation gap between policy and action. According to the paper, a major weakness of the APRM report was an inability to formulate a concrete program of action. The author also blames failures of the APRM on a lack of subsequent monitoring mechanisms, sanctions, and, in general, political will.
Was the APRM process in Kenya a waste of time? (PDF)
Tuesday, May 13, 2008
Was the APRM process in Kenya a waste of time?
Tanzania: The Influence Grid
Global Integrity's Sebastian Sanga writes from Tanzania with a review of last year's electrical power crisis, and the political powers that let it happen. The report, in the words of a peer reviewer, "gives a vivid picture of the gravity of the corruption cankerworm in Tanzania."
Tanzania: The Influence Grid
By Sebastian Sanga
Image: Dar Es Salaam (Julienne/Flickr)
My mind reels whenever I think of the electricity crisis that plagues Tanzania. The nights are the worst: Frequent outages enable thieves and bandits to ply their trade, terrorizing the citizens. The risk of deadly fires is high as people opt for candles and oil lamps to light their houses.
Rolling blackouts are now the rule rather than the exception. In the process, many industrial and domestic appliances are damaged. Fires are rampant in many areas of the city. And there is little hope of lasting change — because of the problem of corruption.
Across the country, the air is thick with fumes from generators. The hum of their motors is heard everywhere in the cities and towns. The pollution is compounded by the smoke that emanates from thousands and thousands of chimneys and windows, as firewood and charcoal have replaced electricity for domestic use. And 99 percent of the rural population — nearly 28 million people — have no access to electricity at all.
This causes unprecedented deforestation rates, with over 91,000 acres of forests vanishing annually due to the voracious demand for firewood. Wood biomass accounts for 90 percent of total energy consumption. Meanwhile, the imposition of strict rules on charcoal businesses — originally put in place for environmental reasons — prove nearly impossible to enforce, due to the lack of alternative sources of power. Instead, the price of charcoal keeps rising, affecting the standard of living of the majority of ordinary Tanzanians. A bag of charcoal now sells for 25,000 shillings (US$20.04) — a considerable burden on low income earners.
Power outages have a variety of spillover effects. For instance, water crises in Dar es Salaam are endemic due to the electricity required to keep the city's water pumps operating. Residents often are forced to drink water from unhygienic sources, leading to deadly cases of diarrhea and other diseases.
The poor are hardest hit. Meanwhile, the powerful are capitalizing on the tragedy to accumulate wealth with which to contract defective and controversial power projects. Meanwhile, the lack of rainfall reduced electricity production at the hydroelectric plants from their installed capacity of 650 megawatts to as low as 200.
To counter the crisis, the government tried various strategies, including signing contracts to lease gas turbines from, among others, the U.S.-based Richmond Development Co. (RDC). The government planned to lease a 100-megawatt power plant, for US$172 million. Construction was planned for December of 2006 at the latest. The contract, unfortunately, was a scam. RDC turned out to be a "mailbox company" that had no record of credentials in the United States. Mohammed Hugue, an economist from Pakistan, and a Tanzanian-born businessman, Mohamed Gire, were behind the project.
Investigations revealed that RDC had links to a number of powerful local interests but had no experience or capacity in the energy sector. Furthermore, there were other allegations that Mohamed Gire had improperly leveraged connections with a number of friends who were ministers and other government elites.
The project approval process was also questionable: big shots wielded undue influence on procurement projects on behalf of RDC, despite a previous evaluation report by a technical team of the Tanzania Electric Supply Co. (TANESCO). The report found that RDC was incapable of executing the project. Other informants linked ministers to the firm. The prime minister, Edward Lowassa, who personally formed the committee to negotiate the power deal with RDC, contrary to the position of the technical team, was at the center of the talks about the controversial project.
Production was to start within 60 days, between Sept. 18 and Nov. 18, 2006. But the deadlines passed with nothing but excuses. While RDC's country manager, Naeem Gire, claimed his firm had difficulty shipping the turbine from North Carolina, TANESCO said RDC was trying, in vain, to raise US$10 million from the local sources to pay for lease and air freight charges.
Guarantee was a problem: RDC had lately transferred the offer to a third party, Dowans Holdings of the United Arab Emirates, for an undisclosed amount. Dowans Holdings, for its part, had managed to pocket US$102 million from the government, despite complaints by the public to stop the deal so as to launch an independent parliamentary committee to carry out investigations.
Opposition legislators pressed for an independent parliamentary committee to investigate widespread allegations of corruption in the deal,within the executive branch. In April 2007, ministers blocked the matter to be discussed in the House and passed the issue to the Prevention and Combating of Corruption Bureau (PCCB), a pro-state anti-corruption agency.
A tug-of-war emerged between PCCB and Parliament. The PCCB criticized the legislators for their demands to probe into the power deal, saying the issue was under its jurisdiction. This assertion was challenged by the speaker of Parliament, but he was unable to bring the topic to the floor — which forced Parliament to drop the whole issue, following the negative reaction from the executive and from a cross-section of legislators from the ruling party, which occupied over 85 percent of the seats. The prime minister is alleged to have summoned parliamentarians from the ruling Chama Cha Mapinduzi (CCM) party and instructed them to abandon the RDC issue for the sake of party solidarity. The PCCB prepared its own investigative report, which conveniently cleared the executive in the scam. PCCB is accountable to the president, and the bureau's director is a presidential appointee. Efforts to make PCCB an entity independent from the executive proved futile in April 2007, when the government opposed the idea.
In July 2007, members of Parliament raised fresh concerns over the scandals in the power sector, including the PCCB report on the RDC deal. Parliament wanted to gain access to other contracts pertaining to other questionable projects. But their efforts hit a snag for the second time as ministers, including the new minister for energy and minerals, Nazir Karamagi, were adamant that the contracts were the exclusive preserve of the executive branch.
Corruption in the energy sector is making life difficult not only for Tanzania's poor, but also for its investment community. Households and industries connected to the national grid face exorbitant tariffs coupled with an unreliable power supply. Viable power sources like coal and other new hydropower sources are neglected. They include the Kiwira coal plant, with the capacity to produce up to 200 megawatts and the Mchuchuma coal plant, with a 400-megawatt capacity. Hopes that the new government would be able to curb corruption are evaporating as disputed projects continue to gain approval from the executive.
Existing Independent Power Projects (IPPs), including Independent Power Tanzania Ltd. (IPTL) and Songas, are but a burden to the taxpayers. IPTL costs Tanzanians dearly. Studies have found IPTL to be more expensive than 16 similar diesel projects in developing countries. In 2005, charges to TANESCO by IPPs averaged US$13 million per month, equivalent to 68 percent of utility revenue. By 2006, charges reached US$17.5 million per month, more than 95 percent of total utility revenue, making it impossible for TANESCO to be a sustainable venture to finance investment as part of improving reliability or expanding electrification.
The power sector drama is just the tip of the iceberg of corruption in Tanzania. The Bank of Tanzania (BoT) is now embroiled in financial scandals. BoT has lately paid some US$30.8 million to a suspicious company, Kagoda Agriculture Ltd. (KAL) which claimed to have been "assigned" to collect debts owed to twelve foreign creditors from Europe, Japan, and the U.S. The money was paid to KAL, which presented deeds of assignment "signed" between Sept. 10 and Nov. 3, 2005. The company managed to raise this huge amount in a very short time after its registration. The foreign creditors have denied that they appointed KAL to collect the funds on their behalf.
Furthermore, a document circulating on Internet message boards fans the flames of the BoT scandals. The unconfirmed report claims that an organized crime network involving Indians, law firms and Tanzanian civil service employees continues to embezzle resources from the central bank. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has instructed the government to appoint an accredited firm to audit the Bank of Tanzania's accounts. Parliament has demanded a parliamentary probe of the allegations, but the Ministry of Finance has rejected the idea.
The KAL drama and the alleged formation of an organized crime network is just the beginning. Other scandals involve the construction of the Bank of Tanzania Twin Towers, whose overall cost is said to have been so inflated that it now stands at a staggering US$340 million. Experts say one could construct four similar buildings in London or Tokyo with the same amount of money. Other reports of poor governance have emerged in the mining, hunting and timber export industries. Some reports estimate that 96 percent of logging revenue is lost due to corruption.
A lack of checks and balances in the system is partly to blame. Abuse of power continues to thwart efforts to promote sound governance, while Parliament has proven nearly useless in its oversight role and as a check on executive power. Democratic governance is elusive as powerful and self-interested economic actors gain control over the executive branch and wield its powers to their own advantage. Annual auditing of public funds by the Controller and Auditor General, capacity building for the PCCB, awareness campaigns on corruption, donor-supported governance initiatives as well as the formation of the sector Parliamentary Committee are not effective enough.
This is partly due to state capture, a process in which powerful elites from the private sector buy off politicians and bureaucrats to twist laws, budgets, projects, policies and regulatory environments in their own interest. The majority of parliamentarians are little more than rubber-stamp legislators, who approve defective plans from the executive branch with little due diligence or scrutiny. Political patronage dilutes governance-building initiatives.
Thanks to political stability, there have been no riots to date. But unless a comprehensive effort is made across all branches of government to promote sound governance and integrity in government, Tanzania's infrastructure and resource challenges will be here to stay.
Read critical peer review of this report.
Monday, May 12, 2008
South Africa: Gov't Sacks Media Chief
Media independence takes a knock in South Africa, with an apparently retaliatory sacking. While publicly-supported broadcasters are often quite good (the BBC comes to mind), there is a built in risk of government interference, and here it is.
RSF press release, via AllAfrica.Reporters sans Frontières (Paris)
PRESS RELEASE
7 May 2008
Posted to the web 7 May 2008
The board of the South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC) announced today that it has suspended the public broadcaster's CEO, Dali Mpofu, with immediate effect pending an investigation and possible disciplinary measures for "insubordination."
The announcement came just hours after Mpofu suspended SABC's head of news Snuki Zikalala for "divulging confidential information." Zikalala had often been accused of bias in favour of President Thabo Mbeki and an internal report last October accused him of preventing certain government critics from voicing their views as commentators.
Reporters Without Borders
Monday, May 5, 2008
Kenya: Linking Violence & Corruption
An analysis of recent political violence in Kenya posits that corruption and failures of the democratic process, not ethnicity, are driving the conflict. While few readers here will be shocked by this conclusion, the authors do a fine job of assembling the supporting evidence.
Authors Rachel Itwaru and Sarah J. Johnson:Indeed, though the killing has been mostly between members of different tribes, this tragedy is not simply a story of longstanding ethnic divisions. Instead, the conflict is a product of two political factors: Kenya’s historically corrupt government, and the willingness of some politicians to exploit the anger following the elections by encouraging violence.
Full analysis at the Harvard Political Review.
Global Integrity's take: Global Integrity Report: Kenya.
Friday, April 25, 2008
Zimbabwe Government Arrests Opposition
Grim headlines from Zimbabwe, as the government moves openly against the opposition Movement for Democratic Change and independent election monitors.
IRIN: Zimbabwe: Police Swoop On Injured MDC Supporters
IHT: Zimbabwe police raid opposition party office
Friday, April 18, 2008
South Africa: Corruption & Governance Archive
Global Integrity's International Director, Marianne Camerer, shares a link to an archive of coverage and papers addressing corruption in South Africa. All together, the collection spans 11,000 pages assembled in the course of Marianne's PhD dissertation.
Marianne writes:
This collection of research material from South Africa, a new democracy, covers the period from 1994-2006 and includes a range of policy documents on governance and corruption. These include political cartoons; newspaper articles; parliamentary records; Auditor General and Public Protector reports; conference proceedings; policy and strategy documents; corruption surveys and court records of high-profile corruption trials, pertaining to the South African arms deal. The material was collected for my PhD dissertation in Political Studies from the University of the Witwatersrand on "Corruption and Reform in Democratic South Africa". It includes my own published research in this field from 1996 as an applied policy researcher at the Institute for Security Studies, a leading think tank in South Africa and will be a useful resource for scholars and practitioners both in Africa and more widely interested in how new democracies set out to tackle the corruption issue.
The link: Corruption and Governance in Democratic South Africa
God: 91%, Government: 74%, Corruption: 29%
Via Chris Blattman's Blog, the latest polling from Liberia. Blattman observes, "Why, I wonder, is the War on Corruption in the same headline as God? Is God some sort of baseline for maximum possible support?"
And here is our own (less amusing) coverage of corruption in Liberia.
Tuesday, March 11, 2008
Africa: Why Public Health Programs Are Failing
Global Integrity contributor Thompson Ayodele writes in with an analysis of aid, public health campaigns, and the corruption that prevents medical care from reaching the people who need it most.
Health, Africa’s struggle
Foreign aid is flowing in in large amounts, but it’s not reaching the people
By Thompson Ayodele
After decades of neglect the provision of effective health care is becoming one of the biggest concerns in Africa.
Both foreign donors and African governments are keen to make this their priority and, consequently, the money taps have been opened.
Foreign aid in the form of hard currency is flowing in unprecedented quantities into the ministries of health of many African countries.
But despite this generosity things are not improving : medical staff are demoralized, access to essential medicines remains low and corruption remains a serious problem.
Development assistance for health has increased from about R20billion in 1990 to more than R104billion in 2005. Overall, about 10 percent of Africa’s health care expenditure is now financed directly by donor aid.
Nevertheless, the majority of African countries are way off track with progress towards the health-related Millennium Development Goals.
Access to essential medicines remains low in the poorest parts of the world. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), more than 50 percent of Africans lack access to essential medicines.
Around the world more than 10million children in developing countries die unnecessarily from diseases that are easily preventable and cheap to treat, such as diarrhoea, measles and malaria.
Furthermore, up to 80 percent of Africans have to pay for treatment straight from their own pockets. In short, public health systems are failing to deliver.
A major factor behind this failure of foreign aid to improve health care is the fact that nearly all of it first passes through health ministries before it reaches patients.
According to studies undertaken by the WHO and the Centre for Global Development in Washington DC, bureaucrats have little idea of what actually happens to the money after it is handed over to governments.
As a result of these lax controls, a great deal of this money is subverted by health officials for private gain, particularly in countries that have a problem with corruption. This can occur in the ministry itself, or further down the line in the hospital.
A study by Maureen Lewis of the World Bank shows that corruption in the healthcare sector of developing countries is so bad that it severely undermines the effectiveness of donor funding.
The leakage of drugs from the supply chain is a particular problem, mainly since publicly funded drugs can fetch a high price if stolen and resold on the black market.
Recent surveys in Nigeria show that 28 public health centres had received no drugs from the federal government in two years.
Meanwhile, a 2001 study by the World Bank showed that fewer than half of government health facilities in Lagos and Kogi states had received drugs from the federal government.
Last year National Agency for Food and Drug Administration and Control boss Dora Akunyili disclosed that it is commonplace for donated drugs such as vitamin A capsules, Mectizan and Coartem tablets and oral rehydration salt to be pilfered and resold on the open market.
In the same vein it was reported that the Global Fund was considering suspending two of Nigeria’s five-year grants totaling R640million because of concerns over grant management, transparency of fund allocation and grant implementation and the ability of the Nigerian government to achieve the goals of the grants.
The Global Fund has already terminated grants to Uganda and Chad.
And this is not counting the dozens of other forms of corruption that plague the health system in Nigeria, including mismanagement of funds at the ministry and hospital level; absenteeism; staff extracting payments from patients for services that are supposed to be free; and the abuse of procurement contracts for supplies.
According to the NGO Human Rights Watch “the government’s failure to tackle local-level corruption violates Nigeria’s obligation to provide basic health and education services to its citizens”.
Add to this the chronic mismanagement that has left health workers owed months’ pay and hospitals with obsolete equipment, and it seems hardly surprising that donor funding is not making much of a difference to patients’ health.
Healthcare delivery in Africa is never going to improve while it remains under the control of the public sector.
Government ministries have very few incentives to deliver care to patients other than the goodwill of their staff.
As any manager of a private company will tell you, relying on this alone is not going to keep your customers. Unless there is a significant change in the way we manage the health sector, there will be few improvements – no matter how much money donors spend.
Bearing in mind the historic failure of African public health systems to provide citizens with the care they deserve, we should shift towards a situation in which governments no longer provide and manage all health care. The private sector should be given a far bigger role as well.
Thompson Ayodele is executive director of Initiative for Public Policy Analysis, a Lagos-based think tank.
Image 1: Doctor examines infant at PMI hospital; a hospital for women and children. Cote d'Ivoire. Photo: Ami Vitale / World Bank.(CC)
Image 2: An HIV awareness poster in Kenya. Treveno/Flickr (CC)
Monday, March 10, 2008
Uganda: Laws Alone Will Not Help
Ugandan analyst Jasper Mpiriirwe notes that legal implementations, not legal codes, are the trouble spots in Uganda. Uganda has the largest gap between law and practice of any country Global Integrity studied in 2007.
Laws Alone Will Not Help
By Jasper Mpiriirwe
Reprinted from The Monitor (Kampala), 8 March 2008
I have heard many times the hullabaloo of enacting more laws especially against corruption. Uganda has made a lot of strides in the legal framework as far as corruption in Africa is concerned. In fact on comparative terms, the legal framework in our country ranks among the best in Africa with the Global Integrity Report putting it at 90%.
Government has now tabled the Whistle Blowers Bill and the Witness Protection Bill in parliament which are supposed to protect a person who discloses information against a public official on misconduct, corruption.
These bills, if passed, will further reinforce the Inspectorate of Government Act 2002, the Leadership Code Act 2003, the Access to Information Act 2005, Public Procurement and Disposal Of Assets Act 2003 etc on the fight against corruption.
However, for some reason, whistleblowers have remained more endangered than suspected fraudsters! Clear previous recommendations to protect whistleblowers have just been ignored by corrupt management. It seems therefore that although on one hand there will be a law to protect a whistleblower, on the other hand the enforcement of any legislation depends on the mood of the implementer rather than the legal provisions!
A whistleblower is a person who on his own free will makes a disclosure on corruption, misconduct or criminal offence by a public official or agency to a person or agency capable of investigating the complaint. Ask Athanasias Kakwemire, formerly of NDA if you want to know the cost of whistle blowing in Uganda.
Uganda is a signatory to the UN Convention on Preventing and Combating Corruption 2003 and Article 33 provides that each state/party shall consider incorporating into its domestic system measures to provide protection against any unjustified treatment for any person who reports in good faith and reasonable grounds to competent authorities any facts or acts of corruption.
The 1995 Constitution as amended provides that "all public offices shall be held in trust for the people, all persons placed in positions of leadership and responsibility shall, in their work, be answerable to the people, and all lawful measures shall be taken to expose, combat and eradicate corruption and abuse or misuse of power by those holding political or other public offices."
The Access to Information Act is in force and one of its purposes is to protect persons disclosing evidence of contravention of the law, corruption etc. The regulatory and institutional framework of this Act as provided is still 'hot air' to date.
Whistleblower legislation indeed will be another tool to expose and combat corruption in Uganda. But all that government needs is a mechanism that would ensure enforcement of the law. The Bill will seek to protect whistleblowers and witnesses in corruption cases from reprisals, dismissal, victimisation by the accused persons or institutions but our history shows the opposite.
What we need therefore is more of the will than just words!
The writer is a policy analyst and coordinator, Anti-Corruption Coalition Uganda
Friday, February 29, 2008
Chadian Crisis Deepen Fault Lines within African Union
By Thompson Ayodele
Photo: (cc) Mark Knobil
The situation in Chad evokes images of African countries that had similar poor political and economic profiles -- Liberia, Chad, Kenya, Sudan, Somalia to name a few. What appears to be responsible for this plethora of crises has been a constant struggle for political power for groups that had been excluded from the spoils of economic progress and fraudulent electoral processes.
In the last four decades, Chad has remained a highly unstable country. The crisis began shortly after independence. The political control of the country went to the southerners causing a revolt of the northern Chadian tribes against the south in 1966. This started a cycle of civil conflicts, which, after a period of uneasy peace between 1990 and 2004, has blown up again. In 2006 a peace deal was signed but it only lasted for two months. Shortly after, a massacre took place in the eastern Chadian village of jawara with over 100 civilians either shot or hacked to death by Sudanese Janjaweed militia and local Chadian rebels.
Chad is one of the poorest in the world. Over 80% of Chad’s population relies on subsistence farming and livestock raising for its livelihood. Last year, the government committed itself to spending 70% of its budget on development needs such as increase in access to healthcare delivery and education. However none of this materialized. The Chadian government is widely seen by many Chadians as corrupt and has not been selfless as promised to alter the present rate of poverty. Unfortunately, the recent crisis has left a deluge of refugees with 20,000 in Cameroon, 3,500 in
Nigeria with severe humanitarian consequences.
The discovery of oil has not altered positively the lives of the people. Oil proceeds have been grossly mismanaged and promises have not been fulfilled.
The failure of the World Bank backed Chad-Cameroon oil pipeline project valued at $3.7 billion to reduce poverty has helped the rebels to build the much-needed support. The worsening economic situation has enabled the rebels to get more sympathizers. The discovery of oil also provides a real opportunity for the rebels to wrestle control of government mainly to lay hand on oil-related revenue. Rebels are largely fighting for the control of oil revenue.
With the exception of China Oil Company that signed an exploration agreement worth $30million, Chad has not fared better in terms of direct foreign investments. The World Bank has recently frozen $100 million oil royalties after parliament in N’Djamena voted to amend Petroleum Revenue Management contrary to earlier agreement. Prior to 2005, foreign investment in the oil sector alone was put at 30%. This plummeted to 8.0% in the subsequent years. One possible explanation for this is that
investors are wary of the prevailing situation in Chad. The ultimate victims, of course, are millions of Chadians.
It is quite possible that interference by France in the internal politics of Chad could be responsible for renewed hostilities. However, the actual cause of the crisis is attributed to the internal opposition to President Idriss Deby. With a new democratic constitution introduced in 1996 which produced Deby as president, he has in turn been caught up in an executive inertia. The constitution has been amended paving the way for him to be elected for the third term. Again he has positioned his son as his likely successor. Another election is due later this year. A rigged outcome would
of course be what President Deby wants.
The events unfolding in Kenya and Chad are test cases for the African Union over its relevance in the 21st century. While the African Union does inform the whole world about its efforts or steps being taken to end crises in parts of the continent, most often such efforts have failed to cut ice. Condemning the likes of Deby and Kibaki would be tantamount to condemning many leaders who cherish longevity on the throne.
On a number of occasions, the AU continues to display its inability to proffer solution to crises within Africa. It continues to treat with kid-gloves those whose actions are responsible for crises. For instance, at the just concluded AU meeting, president Kibaki actions in Kenya were not condemned in absolute terms for the killings in Kenya. Instead, it was a wine-sipping moment.
It is crystal clear the crisis in Chad can only be resolved through constitutionalism, the rule of law and not through the battlefield. To make this happen, the whole process would have to be spearheaded by the African Union. It must take a pro-active role in resolving most of the crises on the continent. Failure to do so would portray African Union as a body that is always prepared to shirk one of its primary responsibilities -- protecting ordinary African citizens from plunder.
Mr. Ayodele is a Global Integrity contributor and the Executive Director of Initiative for Public Policy Analysis, a Lagos-based think-tank.
Edited by AfricanLiberty.org; reposted with permission of the author.
Image: (cc) Mark Knobil
Thursday, February 28, 2008
Progress in Kenya
IHT: Power-sharing agreement is reached in Kenya
Quoting:
Kenyan political leaders ended a two-month standoff on Thursday that had plunged this country into violence, reaching a long-sought agreement to share power between the government and the opposition.
The country seemed to let out a collective hooray as Mwai Kibaki, the president, and Raila Odinga, the top opposition leader, sat down at a desk in front of the president's office, with a bank of television cameras rolling, and signed an agreement that creates a powerful prime minister position for Odinga and splits cabinet positions between the government and the opposition.
Thursday, February 21, 2008
Reporter's Notebook: Malawi
By Suzanne Marmion
If you thought your old school desk was uncomfortable, consider the classroom in Malawi just outside the commercial capital of Blantyre. The "schoolhouse" is simply a tree. Beneath its sheltering branches, children have arranged a circle of rocks. Some stones are barely bigger than a fist. Imagine teetering on one of those through an arithmetic lesson.
Here, in one of the poorest countries in the world, children often learn in crumbling mud-and-grass structures, or as in this case, no structure at all. Yet just behind the scattering of "chair" stones, there stands a new school building built of tidy red bricks. Inside, rows of sanded wooden desks and chairs face an empty blackboard. A heavy padlock on the door keeps the children and their teachers locked out.
Read more in the Global Integrity Report: Malawi...
Friday, February 8, 2008
Tanzania: Procurement Scandal Takes Down Prime Minister
Prime Minister Edward Lowassa has resigned Friday, following the completion Wednesday of a Parliamentary investigation into his dealings with the supposedly U.S.-based Richmond Development Company (RDC). The company turned out to be non-existent, with assets barely more than a post-office box. The government's ill-fated hiring of RDC to provide badly needed electrical power plants was covered at length in the Global Integrity Report: Tanzania, published last week.
Energy Minister Nazir Karamagi and East African Cooperation Minister Idrissa Msabaha have also resigned. The president of Tanzania has dissolved the Cabinet. Tanzanian media appears quite happy with the resignations. Mizengo Pinda has been named the new prime minister.
Global Integrity's analysis of anti-corruption in Tanzania identified systemic weaknesses in the oversight of public expenditure, noting that "the Public Accounts Committee is chaired by the opposition, but the committee still has very limited influence, and the chair frequently makes public comments defending the status quo."
In related news, the ongoing scandal has prompted some enthusiastic local coverage of the Global Integrity Report: Tanzania.
Monday, February 4, 2008
Nigeria: A study in patronage
Our friends at the Initiative of Public Policy Analysis, based in Lagos, have an analysis of the government's failed efforts to jumpstart the local concrete industry in Nigeria by restricting imports. Reading this, I am struck by how fuzzy the lines between failed-but-well-intentioned economic policy and state-capture can be. However, the analysis concludes:
License-or quota-based importation in whatever form effectively limits the powers of the market to operate efficiently. It creates distortions and diverts resources allocation. Resources that could be used to enhance local output are diverted into political patronage to compete for import licenses. Lifting the ban on bagged cement is at best a short-term remedy, not a long-term measure that can potentially achieve competition and lower prices. Indeed, the history of cement importation in Nigeria suggests that the latest is a familiar tune to reward political patronage...
Read the full analysis: Part One. Part Two.
Thursday, January 31, 2008
Wednesday, January 30, 2008
Clean Elections No Guarantee of Strong Democratic Society
New Report Assesses Anti-Corruption Mechanisms and Government Accountability in 55 Countries, Including First Investigation of
(Washington D.C.) – Although elections are often touted as the linchpin of governance reform efforts around the world, a new report finds long-term benefits offered by elections are often undermined by a lack of government accountability and the absence of strong anti-corruption mechanisms. The report, a major investigative study of 55 countries, was released today by Global Integrity, an international nonprofit organization that tracks global governance and corruption trends.
“We have to stop using elections as a simplistic litmus test for a government’s commitment to democracy,” said Global Integrity’s Managing Director Nathaniel Heller. “We now know there is little linkage between elections and the much tougher reforms that must be made, especially in countries at political crossroads such as Pakistan, Ukraine, Georgia, and Kenya.”
The Global Integrity Report: 2007 covers most of the Group of 8 (G8) countries as well as dozens of the world’s emerging markets and developing nations, from Argentina to China to Zambia. Rather than try and measure corruption directly, the report investigates and assesses the government accountability mechanisms and transparency measures needed to prevent corruption and promote good governance.
Many of the findings of the report should be sobering for policy makers and investors alike. The weaknesses found in China’s anti-corruption framework, for example, raise questions as to the true risks facing investors rushing to capitalize on the country’s economic boom– and to the risks Chinese investment funds pose to Western markets. “China’s lack of strong anti-corruption mechanisms could soon be to foreign investment what subprime mortgages have been to the U.S. economy,” stated Heller. “The message from our report to investors should sound a lot like ‘buyer beware’.”
Other major findings of the report include the following:
· The US and other G8 countries suffer from many of the same corruption challenges as developing countries, especially in election and campaign financing. While many observers tend to assume that wealthier countries have developed to a point where corruption is no longer a problem, Global Integrity’s 2007 data for the United States, France, Italy, Japan, and Canada paints a decidedly different picture.
· Despite the conventional wisdom that changes in governance and anti-corruption performance take many years to manifest themselves, several countries exhibited significant improvements or backsliding from 2006 to 2007. The biggest gainers in the past year were Bulgaria, Nepal and Azerbaijan; Nigeria and Georgia were the countries that experienced the greatest declines.
· Poor ratings for several close allies of the United States highlight the challenges the U.S. faces in promoting democratic reforms in countries where it has competing security interests. The report found that countries like Pakistan and Georgia posted ‘weak’ or ‘very weak’ ratings for many of the anti-corruption, accountability and transparency indicators.
· A widespread lack of government accountability among foreign aid recipients presents serious dilemmas for Western and multilateral aid agencies. Despite a growing awareness by aid donors of the need to direct aid to non-governmental stakeholders, like civil society groups, aid agencies continue working primarily with the very same executive branches that are often hindering democratic reforms.
“This report should be a roadmap for change and a wake-up call to policy makers, investors, and aid donors around the globe,” said Global Integrity’s International Director, Marianne Camerer. “It’s also a take-action toolkit for public officials and citizens who want to fight corruption and increase government accountability.”
The report is the product of months of on-the-ground reporting and data gathering by a team of more than 250 in-country journalists and researchers who prepared more than a million words of text and 20,000 data points for their respective countries. Twenty-four countries were repeated from Global Integrity’s 2006 assessments, while 31 were newly assessed.
To access the Global Integrity Report: 2007, please visit http://report.globalintegrity.org. For more information about the organization, visit http://www.globalintegrity.org. Global Integrity is an independent, non-profit organization tracking governance and corruption trends around the world. Global Integrity works with local teams of researchers and journalists to monitor openness and accountability. Its data and reporting are used routinely by aid donors, governments, grassroots advocates, and investors to prioritize governance challenges in countries and develop roadmaps for reform.
Global Integrity is grateful to the Legatum Institute for Global Development ( www.ligd.org) for its continued support of Global Integrity’s work. LIGD is an independent policy, advocacy and advisory organisation within the Legatum group of companies (www.legatum.com). The Institute’s mission is to research and promote those principles that drive the creation of global prosperity and the expansion of human liberty and well-being, including the rule of law, transparency, and accountable government as the pillars of a prosperous and free society. Other supporters of the Global Integrity Report: 2007 were the Australian Agency for International Development, the Wallace Global Fund, and the World Bank.
Tuesday, January 29, 2008
Opposition MP killed in Kenya
Mugabe Were, a freshman parliamentarian, could have been one of the keys to unlocking Kenya’s crisis but on Tuesday he was shot dead in his driveway.
Friday, January 25, 2008
Why institutions matter
Writing for The Nation (Nigeria), Global Integrity contributor Thompson Ayodele calls to focus on shared institutions, not individual failings, when understanding corruption:
Rather than personifying the war of corruption, it is imperative to build effective institutions that would expose corrupt individuals and ensure that they do not escape justice. The difference between a country where there is a low level of corruption and a country where corruption constitutes huge problem can be explained by the quality of the shared rules and the institutions which coordinate individuals. Some countries adhere to rules which engender trust among public office holders and provide the incentive to perform. Others have rules system that allow officials to milk public purse and further deprive their citizens the fruits of risk taking efforts. Human beings anywhere depend on the right kind of institutional system.Read the rest at The Nation.
Sunday, January 20, 2008
New Blog Design
With the help of some talented programmers who offer their work to the open-source community, as well as some good old fashioned poking-around-with-code, we have a new layout for the Commons. Not all features are up to speed yet, but the outline is here.
Friday, January 11, 2008
The World's Leading Think Tanks
Global Integrity collaborates with many of the world's leading governance and corruption researchers at some of the top think tanks around the world. We were thrilled to hear that our friends at the Institute for Security Studies in South Africa were just named the top think tank in sub-Saharan Africa!