Welcoming delegates from Africa and other parts of the world,
South African President Thabo Mbeki hoped that the 9th International
Anti-Corruption Conference (IACC) would give "an added impetus
to all of us as Africans further to intensify our own offensive
against the scourge of corruption." Judging from the pervasive
African participation throughout the 10-15 October deliberations,
it likely will have just that effect, as the delegates return
home to press for more concerted action against graft in their
own countries and internationally.
Held every two years since 1983, and now organized by Transparency
International, a Berlin-based advocacy group devoted to combating
corruption worldwide (see box, below), this was the first IACC
convened in Africa. It also was the largest so far, with some
1,600 registered participants from 134 countries, significantly
higher than the 1,000 delegates who traveled to Lima, Peru, for
the previous conference. As a result, African concerns and perspectives
on corruption have been injected much more intensively into the
global discussions on how best to tackle the problem.
"Meeting here on the African continent for the first time,
we were moved by the special contributions made by our African
colleagues, as they shared their own insights into a malaise which
they share with all regions of the world," the delegates
noted in their concluding declaration, the "Durban Commitment
to Effective Action Against Corruption."
Photo: ICC
While the conference participants included many government
officials, representatives of international donor agencies, corporate
executives, prosecutors, judges, and other professionals, some
of the most forceful contributions came from civil society and
non-governmental organizations (NGOs). Ms. Wangari Maathai, leader
of Kenya's environmental Greenbelt Movement, prompted a standing
ovation during the opening plenary session after she vehemently
criticized both government officials and multinational corporations
for their involvement in corrupt practices across Africa, and
emphasized the central role of non-governmental and citizens groups
in combating the affliction. She also urged anti-corruption campaigners
to not address the issue in an abstract, general way, but to "give
corruption a face," that is, identify both its perpetrators
and its victims.
Despite some Western portrayals of Africa as a continent particularly
prone to corruption, many conference speakers drew attention to
the global nature of the phenomenon, citing recent scandals in
the European Commission, the laundering of ill-gotten Russian
funds through US banks, the contribution of corruption and cronyism
to the 1997-98 Asian financial crisis, and numerous other examples
of large-scale malfeasance. They urged corporations to stop bribing
foreign officials, and called on Northern banks to return the
"blood money" stolen from developing countries and deposited
in secret accounts.
While corruption's scope is worldwide, "it is especially
destructive in developing countries, with their delicate economic
situations. It has critically hobbled and skewed Africa's development,"
UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan affirmed in a message presented
by Under- Secretary-General Pino Arlacchi.
"African governments in particular must get tough on this
issue, and make the fight against corruption a genuine priority,"
Mr. Annan's message continued. "The costs of not doing so
are very high -- in lost resources, lost foreign investment, distorted
decision making, and failing public confidence."
Since the main purpose of the conference was to discuss strategies
for combating corruption, few participants looked in detail at
specific instances of corruption or its concrete effects. But
virtually all shared a common appreciation of the very serious
impact corruption can have on a country's development prospects.
Hardly any country in Africa has been free of the malady. Over
the past two-three years alone, exposures of corrupt allocations
of land or housing have hit Botswana, Burkina Faso, Egypt, Gambia,
Kenya, and São Tomé and Princípe. Algeria,
Benin and Egypt have been rocked by major state banking scandals,
while cabinet ministers accused of financial misdeeds have been
sacked or jailed in Ghana, Ethiopia, Mozambique and South Africa,
among other countries.
In a few of Africa's larger economies, the losses have been staggering. A single fraudulent gold exporting scheme in Kenya cost the state treasury more than $150 mn. Under former dictatorships in Nigeria and the Democratic Republic of Congo (then called Zaire), literally billions of dollars were estimated to have been siphoned off into foreign bank accounts. But even smaller economies sometimes have been hit by big losses. In Benin, managing directors of four state enterprises have been accused of misappropriating up to $62 mn, while the prime minister of São Tomé and Princípe has reported to parliament that corruption in that tiny island nation seriously threatened fiscal management, in turn jeopardizing assistance from multilateral financial institutions.
"Corruption," President Festus Mogae of Botswana told
the conference, "exacerbates poverty in that it effectively
transfers real resources from official state coffers to the few
rich and powerful." Corruption also distorts factor prices,
he added, in that those who benefit from corruption "are
rewarded for little or no work done and the cost of projects turns
out higher than it would be." It likewise distorts economic
decision-making, sometimes giving priority to development projects
that may have little or no national benefit, President Mogae observed.
Studies by the World Bank estimate that countries with widespread
corruption may have economic growth rates of between 0.5 per cent
and 1 per cent less than would otherwise be the case. Corruption's
impact, World Bank President James Wolfensohn told the conference,
is felt most "by the poorest levels of society," for
example in the distribution of seeds or medicines, in street and
market trading, at police checkpoints and in many other areas
of activity.
While corruption "bears with special cruelty upon the
world's most poor," noted the conference's Durban Commitment,
it also "debases human rights" and "destroys confidence
in democracy and the legitimacy of governments."
In this way, widespread corruption has been seen as a contributing
factor to war and civil strife, notably in Liberia, Sierra Leone
and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Even on a less severe scale,
it has added to political instability. Burkina Faso has been swept
over the past year by major protests and strikes over the assassination
of a newspaper editor investigating high-level corruption, while
municipal workers in Malawi have struck to demand the ouster of
corrupt city officials and conservationists in Kenya demonstrated
in early 1999 to block the sale of state forest land to politically
connected individuals.
Corruption, maladministration and poor governance do more than
just undermine economic stability, South African Minister of Education
Kader Asmal told the conference. "They undermine government
in the eyes of the people. They lead to a pervasive cynicism about
politics and politicians, which is disastrous for democracy."
Only limited attention was paid during the conference to assessing
corruption's complex causes, but many of the participants came
to the discussions with strong views about what facilitates its
spread. Mr. Joseph Warioba, Chairman of Tanzania's Presidential
Commission on Corruption, attributed its prevalence mainly to
"greed and poverty" -- the greed of those with wealth
and power, leading to "grand corruption," and the poverty
of ordinary civil servants, policemen and other public employees
who feel driven to supplement their meagre incomes through bribes
and extortion, known as "petty corruption."
Among
other human rights advocates, Mr. Koigi wa Wamwere, head of the
National Democratic and Human Rights Organization of Kenya, drew
a strong link between corruption and undemocratic methods of rule.
He noted that he himself had spent 13 years in prison for his
political activities, including efforts to expose corruption.
Defining corruption primarily as a public sector problem, some
speakers saw economic liberalization as the best long-term solution.
Mr. Alassane Ouattara, former deputy managing director of the
International Monetary Fund and currently seeking to become a
candidate for the presidency of Côte d'Ivoire, argued that
"corrupt behaviour increases often with the size of the public
sector." Consequently, he urged African countries to "try
to diminish the role of the state." Chad's Minister of Finance
Bichera Cherif Daoussa claimed that structural adjustment programmes
reduce the scope for corruption.
Others differed sharply. Mr. John Makumbe, chairman of Transparency
International-Zimbabwe, maintained that adjustment programmes
and economic globalization in fact tend to worsen corruption,
by promoting the interests of Western powers and opening up African
economies to "vultures from the outside."
Mr. Richard Holloway, a senior
analyst of PACT-Zambia, a non-governmental organization, told
Africa Recovery that in the various African countries where
he has worked, economic liberalization and privatization have
widened the gap between the rich and poor, because those with
power have used it to corruptly enrich themselves. "I think
corruption is the flip side of privatization," he said. Ms.
Maathai, from Kenya, encouraged participants to view corruption
itself as a business -- a "business extraordinary" --
that must be checked through coordinated and forceful action.
Mr. Mark Malloch Brown, Administrator of the UN Development Programme
(UNDP), observed that corruption appears actually to have increased
in recent years. Citing the former Soviet bloc in particular,
where there has been an abrupt shift from state-controlled economies
to market economies, he said that "jungle capitalism"
and the corruption that accompanies it are mainly short-term,
transitional problems. Over the long run, he said, the competitiveness
of global capital "rewards the good and punishes the bad."
Speaking directly after him, Mr. J.H. Mensah, Chairman of Ghana's
Parliamentary Accounts Committee, worried about the "the
ethical implications of the capitalist paradigm" and urged
anti-corruption fighters not to ignore its side effects. In this
system, he said, the bottom line is profits, and "the moral
aspect of how the bottom line is realized becomes secondary."
In a similar vein, President Mbeki, in his opening address, warned
about the market economy's "deification of material values"
and insisted that democratic governments play a role "in
evolving the social norms that militate against a perverted, anti-social
individualism."
Whatever the views about the causes of corruption, there was wide agreement that greater effort and determination is needed, in Africa and internationally, to combat the problem. Over the years, numerous anti-corruption strategies have been announced, South African Minister of Justice Penuell Maduna observed, but many have been marked by a "lack of political will." For them to succeed, "there must be a clear commitment on the part of political leadership to combat corruption and to take decisive action against corrupt officials. The leaders themselves must be prepared to submit to scrutiny." To back up such commitment, a wide range of enforcement institutions, independent agencies and watchdog bodies are essential, many speakers emphasized.
President Mogae of Botswana explained that his country, which
often has been cited internationally for its rigourous anti-corruption
approach, employs an "arsenal of measures," including
an autonomous Directorate on Corruption and Economic Crime, a
parliamentary accounts committee to ensure transparency in public
spending, an ombudsman's office to hear citizens' complaints and
various education and training programmes for civil servants and
the general public. Thanks to a policy of "zero tolerance,"
officials caught in fraudulent activities have been fired, imprisoned
and obliged to pay restitution. In 1997, the former chairman of
the Botswana Stock Exchange was convicted and jailed for corruption.
The inauguration in May of Nigeria's first democratically elected
government in 15 years has opened the way for a major process
of "ethical re-engineering" in that country, Minister
of Police Affairs Maj. Gen. David Jemibewon told the conference,
speaking on behalf of President Olusegun Obasanjo, who was unable
to attend the closing ceremony. "To sustain democracy,"
Gen. Jemibewon said, "we have to keep itching fingers and
greedy eyes off the public till. Those in power must be accountable
to the people." Amidst widespread poverty and suffering,
it would amount to "criminal insensitivity for any government
official to live in opulence and luxury," especially if the
wealth has been "stolen from the people."
Since coming into office, the new Nigerian government has launched numerous investigations of corruption, cancelled dubious contracts, forced scores of senior military officers into retirement and seized plots of land and other properties acquired illicitly by high-level former officials. It announced that it already has recovered more than $120 mn stolen under the previous military regimes and has convinced foreign banks to freeze another $600 mn in such officials' overseas accounts. The government has introduced an Anti-Corruption Bill into parliament to provide a more effective legal framework against corruption and misappropriation of public resources.
Namibia held a national consultative conference to forge an "integrity
strategy" in late 1998, reported Mr. Louis du Pisani, the
country's acting deputy prosecutor. Following up on its recommendations,
in March 1999 the cabinet approved the creation of an anti-corruption
unit within the prosecutor-general's office, with powers to both
investigate and take preventive action.
Uganda, which has had its share of high-level corruption in recent
times, has declared "open war" against the affliction,
declared Minister for Ethics and Integrity Miria Matembe. This
included the establishment in June 1998 of a Directorate of Ethics
and Integrity within the president's office, with its head (Ms.
Matembe) enjoying cabinet rank, to coordinate all anti-corruption
efforts. There also are a variety of other monitoring, auditing
and inspection bodies, and the government is considering an extension
of its existing "leadership code" to oblige the spouses
and other family members of high-level officials to declare their
assets in order to make it harder to hide illicitly acquired wealth.
Finally, she added, since "the private sector also is corrupt,"
the government is working with professional bodies to strengthen
ethical codes of conduct for businesses and non-governmental organizations.
Photo: UN
/ Betty Press
Some African countries have been discussing the possibility
of a regional convention against corruption. Europe and Latin
America have such conventions, but so far Africa and Asia do not.
In 1998, the Southern African Development Community held a regional
roundtable on anti-corruption strategies, followed by a second
one just a month before the IACC in Durban. In February 1999,
representatives of 11 African countries (Benin, Botswana, Ethiopia,
Ghana, Malawi, Mali, Mozambique, Senegal, South Africa, Tanzania
and Uganda) met in Washington under the auspices of the Global
Coalition for Africa and adopted a set of principles to combat
corruption in Africa. In light of such initiatives, President
Mogae of Botswana told Africa Recovery that the "atmosphere
is conducive" in Africa now for drawing up an anti-corruption
convention.
Frustration over the frequent ineffectiveness of strictly legalistic approaches broke out during a well-attended Africa regional workshop, as several speakers from both the stage and the floor argued for reversing the "onus of proof" in corruption cases, that is, to presume a defendant guilty until proven innocent. This brought a chorus of protests, with many worrying that it could open the door to rights abuses. Mr. Willie Hofmeyr, a prosecutor heading South Africa's Assets Forfeiture Unit, agreed that a sweeping reversal would be wrong, but suggested it could be considered for purposes of seizing civil servants' unexplained assets, though not for prosecuting them.
Skepticism about the willingness of governments and public officials
to police themselves also brought wide agreement on the need for
independent watchdog bodies. A number of African countries have
or are considering establishing an ombudsman's office. Many of
Africa's newly elected parliaments lack the ability or confidence
to effectively question the actions of public officials, but an
African Parliamentary Network Against Corruption has been formed
to help share experiences and devise proposals for how to strengthen
parliaments' oversight capacities.
A workshop on political corruption recommended legislation to limit the influence of money in election campaigns and party affairs, while another on the media highlighted the central role of the press in helping expose corruption. Whether in the media, civil service or private business, "whistleblowers" must be protected, many agreed.
Time and again, speakers returned to the indispensable role of civil society organizations in providing backbone to the struggle against corruption. They can draw attention to cases of corruption and put pressure on political leaders to follow through on their commitments. They also can help shape public reactions, emphasized Ms. Maathai, by "empowering citizens through civic education so that they can demand accountable and transparent governance from their governments and local authorities."
Since corruption often crosses national borders, the international community as a whole has an important role to play in combating it, the conference agreed. As the UN Secretary-General put it, "Only a global effort is capable of meeting global challenges."
The UN itself is involved in a variety of ways, he pointed out. The UN Centre for International Crime Prevention has launched a global programme against corruption which seeks to help countries build their own institutional capacities, and is working out an agreement with South Africa to aid anti-corruption efforts in its justice system. UNDP now devotes about one-third of its funding to governance issues. At the conference, Mr. Malloch Brown announced a joint UNDP-Transparency International "partnership fund for transparency," specifically to help non-governmental organizations involved in "corruption busting."
With numerous other donor institutions now also involved in corruption issues -- and sometimes linking development assistance levels to progress in combating graft -- some conference participants, including Ms. Maathai, raised concerns that Africa will be saddled with yet more "conditionalities." Mr. Wolfensohn reassured the meeting that the World Bank believed that a successful struggle against corruption could only be waged from within a country. "The Bank and other organizations can help, but the real motive, the real engine, has to come from inside."
Beyond welcoming external assistance for national anti-corruption
efforts, many delegates from Africa and other developing regions
emphasized that industrialized countries must do more to clean
up their own act, to prevent their officials and private sectors
from exporting corruption to the South. So far, noted President
Mogae, Northern governments have failed to take "stern action"
against their own nationals involved in foreign bribery. "The
corrupter and the corrupted must all face the due process of the
law," he affirmed.
There was wide appreciation for the enactment by the industrialized countries' Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) of a convention outlawing the bribery of foreign public officials. The convention, which came into effect in 1999, seeks to close some of the legal loopholes in OECD countries which had permitted foreign bribery, and in some cases even allowed the cost of bribes to be deducted from corporate taxes. Mr. Mark Pieth, chair of the OECD's Working Group on Bribery, said the convention aims to tackle the "supply side" of corruption, thereby contributing more generally to fair trading practices and good governance.
Numerous delegates suggested further action: that public tendering and procurement procedures be made more transparent, that corporations not only stop paying bribes but expose government officials who ask for them, and that the names of multinational corporations that continue to bribe be widely publicized.
Mr. Roger Batty, deputy head of Botswana's Directorate on Corruption, urged better sharing of information and other forms of cooperation by law enforcement agencies in the North, pointing out that it is now often very difficult to investigate corruption cases with international links. Repeatedly, delegates criticized bank secrecy laws in the North which make it very difficult to locate -- and recover -- the vast sums that have been stashed abroad by corrupt officials. Recent investigations of Swiss and US banks have revealed that billions of dollars in illicit funds from Russia, Mexico, Nigeria and other countries are sitting in those banks' "private" accounts.
The final Durban Commitment called very strongly for international curbs on money-laundering and steps to facilitate the return of looted funds. "We find it wholly unacceptable that the moneys should be invested in institutions in the developed world for the benefit of a corrupt few when they are desperately needed by their rightful owners in the South for the benefit of all," the Commitment said.
The Commitment also supported cancellation of the external debt of poor countries, as advocated by the Jubilee 2000 international anti-debt coalition, coupled with mechanisms to eliminate high-level corruption so that the benefits of debt cancellation "flow to the poor and not to corrupt elites."
Combating South Africa's 'blight'As South Africa strives to build democracy and
social justice from the wreckage of apartheid, corruption remains
"a blight on our society," Mr. Stan Sangweni, Chairperson
of the Public Service Commission, told the International Anti-Corruption
Conference in Durban. Nearly a dozen different police, investigative,
judicial, monitoring and auditing agencies are involved in combating
this blight, with the Commission assigned the task of coordinating
their work. Some analysts argue that the relatively open discussion
of corruption in South Africa today -- compared with the secrecy
and censorship of the apartheid era -- has contributed to public
perceptions about the seriousness of the problem. They also note
that the apartheid system itself fostered widespread corruption.
During the apartheid government's final years, numerous cases
of massive fraud and graft came to light, most prominently linked
to secret Defence Department funding, efforts to evade international
oil sanctions, and the operations of the ethnic "homelands."
In a system that denied the vast majority of the population its
most basic citizenship rights, there was little scope for public
transparency and accountability. The democratic government that came into office
in 1994 promised a new vision of inclusive and open governance,
but also inherited some of these problems. Because of the negotiated
nature of the political transition and the reconciliation policy
of the ruling African National Congress (ANC), many of the administrators,
civil servants and policemen of the old national and local bureaucracies
were retained, along with their entrenched habits. As in many other countries undergoing sweeping
change, new opportunities for corruption also have arisen. Some
ANC provincial officials have been forced from office for suspected
involvement in corruption, and scandals have rocked the post
office, state telecommunications enterprise, Department of Health,
South African Broadcasting Corporation and other institutions.
In Gauteng province (which includes Johannesburg), some R1 mn
was diverted from a subsidy scheme intended to help low-income
families build houses. To counter such trends, South Africa's new democratic constitution explicitly declared the public administration must be accountable, transparent and imbued with "a high standard of professional ethics." It created a number of independent institutions, including the Public Service Commission, with broad powers to investigate, monitor and evaluate the functioning of the civil service. Among other bodies, the Auditor-General's office is assigned to detect any improper usage of state funds. The Special Investigating Unit, established by the president and headed by Judge Willem Heath, has been seen as the most independent and aggressive anti-corruption institution. In a report to parliament in February 1999, Judge Heath said the unit had saved the government more than R500 mn during only the first six months of its work.
Fighting corruption is especially important for the "poor and marginalized," Ms. Safoora Sadek, Executive Director of the South African NGO Coalition, stressed at the summit. This is because corruption "diverts much-needed resources away from community to personal enrichment. Corruption demoralizes and paralyzes our efforts at transformation, and therefore must be stopped." |
An international movement
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