Urgent Need to Expand Nigeria’s Anti-Graft Toolkit|Waziri Adio
Two recent events in Abuja beamed the spotlight on the protracted and yet-to-be-won battle against corruption in Nigeria. The first was a conference and a report presentation by Chatham House, one of the world’s preeminent think tanks; the second was the unveiling of an initiative to promote transparency and accountability in Nigeria’s 774 local councils by the Independent Corrupt Practices and Other Related Offences Commission (ICPC). The attention and reflection offered by the two events were necessary and timely, especially in the context of the seeming dip in enthusiasm about anti-corruption in both political and popular consciousness in the country.
It is important to keep the fire of the anti-graft campaign burning as corruption remains the bane of the Nigerian society. The second part of the last sentence is a statement straight out of the inaugural address of President Olusegun Obasanjo at the dawn of this republic in 1999. Without a doubt, anti-corruption has been the most consistent feature of the last 25 years in Nigeria, even when we have also seen uneven emphasis across administrations. We have had a phalanx of laws, institutions, policies and initiatives devoted to checkmating graft in the country, and some significant progress has been made. But there is still much more to be done. In taking this necessary work forward, we need to expand the toolkit for tackling corruption in Nigeria.
On 3rd April, ICPC unveiled an initiative to deepen openness and probity in Nigeria’s local government areas (LGAs). The initiative is called the Accountability and Corruption Prevention Programme for Local Governments in Nigeria (ACPPLG) and will be run with the Centre for Fiscal Transparency and Public Integrity (CFTPI), a civil society organisation. In the main, this initiative is designed to nudge the local councils to comply with laws and policies mandating proactive disclosures of their finances and operations.
All the 774 LGAs will be assessed and ranked based on their performance in terms of public and pro-active disclosures in five broad categories: fiscal transparency, open procurement, human resources, citizens’ engagement, and control of corruption. These five categories have 27 sub-categories, ranging from proactive publication of annual budgets, budget implementation reports, revenue flows, annual audits, debt profiles to records of tenders, procurement and recruitments, staff nominal rolls, and policies on bribery, conflict of interests and whistleblowing and the existence of functional websites, social media accounts and records of interactive engagements with citizens.
I think this is a very important initiative. The local councils are the most critical tier of government in terms of service delivery. This is the tier of government that is not just the closest to the people but it is also where the presence and essence of government should be felt the most. This is hardly the case at the moment. The LGAs are technically the closest tier of government to the people but they are realistically the farthest from the people in terms of impact. Local elections are the least credible, the local officials are rarely accountable, and the local people are seldom involved in decision-making about local priorities and resource allocation. Where governance is needed the most is where it is the most broken. We need to reposition our local councils for them to effectively discharge the responsibilities entrusted to them in the Fourth Schedule of the 1999 Constitution and for them to deliver, like their counterparts elsewhere, on the promise of good governance embedded in the theory of decentralisation.
The 11 July 2024 ruling by the Supreme Court affirming that local councils should only be run by democratically-elected officials and compelling direct federation allocation to the LGAs remains a step in the right direction. But even if both conditions are fully met, they are not sufficient to bring about the needed development at the local level. Accountability and responsiveness will be critical. Free and fair elections and financial autonomy by themselves do not necessarily guarantee accountable, efficient, and responsive governance. This is where the initiatives by ICPC and others can bridge the gap.
The disclosures required by ICPC and on which LGAs will be assessed and ranked are already mandated in various statutes including the laws on freedom of information, public procurement, fiscal responsibility and others. Providing an incentive (through a league table) for LGAs to comply is a great idea that additionally serves three purposes: encouraging peer review/peer learning among the LGAs, reducing the incidence of malfeasance through openness, and empowering citizens with information that they can use to hold local officials to account.
I am aware that CFTPI has been publishing an index for the three tiers of government along these lines. But a ranking by ICPC, an organisation with investigative and prosecutorial powers and national reach, definitely will carry more weight. The partnership between the two organisations is the kind of strategic collaboration needed and a reinforcement of the desirability of a handshake between government and civil society.
It is also noteworthy that the Chairman of ICPC, Dr. Musa Aliyu, attended this event, alongside not just his directors but also the heads of key anti-corruption agencies such as the Code of Conduct Bureau (CCB), Fiscal Responsibility Commission (FRC), Nigerian Financial Intelligence Unit (NFIU), and the Public Complaints Commission (PCC)—all pledging support for the initiative and stating they would be tracking the processes and finances of LGAs to actualise the landmark and desirable ruling of the Supreme Court and in line with their mandates.
But ranking and threats are also not enough. It will be important to get the residents of the various LGAs to become invested in and committed to holding local officials to account and to have the applicable tools and the capacities to do so. The LGAs can publish all the required pieces of information on their websites and this might still not make much difference. The information on the websites might not make much meaning or be accessible to most of the people in the LGAs for instance. The point here is not to dismiss the importance of this critical transparency (and potentially investigatory) tool but to say that other things need to be layered on it, including capacity building and nurturing for community-based groups/local opinion leaders and even the local officials.
On its part, Chatham House hosted a conference in Abuja on March 19th with the theme: “Renewing Nigeria’s Anti-Corruption Agenda—Pathways for Change and Reflections on 25 Years of Policy.” Not unexpectedly, Chatham House brought together the leading figures in the anti-corruption space in the country, from government to civil society, development partners and think tanks.
The agenda statement set the tone for the frank and insightful discussion that followed: “Over the past 25 years, Nigeria has developed a broad set of anti-corruption frameworks and institutions. Yet, corruption remains endemic at multiple levels of society, a reality that has corroded public trust in government, stunted economic growth, and weakened Nigeria’s external standing. Corruption’s resilience—despite the raft of legislation and government bodies created over the last quarter-century—continues to underscore the limitations of top-down policy and legislative responses.”
The event was both reflective and forward-looking, and this was well-captured in the framing of the two sessions: “Taking Stock: 25 Years of Anti-Corruption Efforts in Nigeria”; “Looking Ahead: A Participatory, Multi-Level Approach to Anti-Corruption.” The various speakers and the participants highlighted the need to bridge the research and policy gap, to ensure comprehensive value-reorientation, to leverage technology to limit human contact, to focus on fighting corruption in all sectors and all tiers of society, to make it less difficult for those who want to do the right thing, to celebrate, protect and link integrity champions, to build enduring and resilient social movements, and to impose proper and context-meaningful sanctions for bad behaviours.
The conference also marked the official unveiling of the 50-page research paper by an Associate Fellow of Chatham House’s Africa Programme, Dr. Leena Hoffmann. Entitled “Taking Action against Corruption in Nigeria—Empowering Anti-Corruption Role Models and Coalitions to Change Social Norms,” the paper argues for a normative, bottom-up and networked approach to strengthening the fight against corruption in the country. The conference and the paper were part of Chatham House’s Social Norms and Accountable Governance (SNAG) project, implemented by its Africa Programme since 2015 and supported by the MacArthur Foundation through the groundbreaking On Nigeria programme.
Using a behavioural and norms-based lens, the SNAG project conducted surveys and produced research papers to deepen the understanding of the depth of and the motivations for corruption in Nigeria. I find it interesting that Chatham House started its first major research with trying to understand why Nigerians partake in corruption but concluded the project with valuable insights into why some Nigerians resist corruption. As the report underscores (which is a confirmation of the work by organisations such as Accountability Lab that have been naming and praising integrity icons in the country), there are actually Nigerians who resist corruption, at a significant cost to their careers and sometimes to their safety. Doing the right thing has a cost, and the cost can be steep, but that has not been a deterrent to those who choose to be positive deviants.
One of the things we need to do is to recognise that such people exist, to continue to celebrate and protect them, and to reduce or even eliminate the cost of being upright, then hope that they can create a tipping point. The paper also argues that there is safety in numbers, and I think this is eminently sensible. Integrity icons and anticorruption champions within and outside government stand a better chance if they work together in “networked coalitions” and are supported with the necessary laws (such as a whistleblower law) and with strategic guidance on how to navigate the mines of the narrow path.
As stated earlier, there is an apparent sense of fatigue about anti-corruption in the country. This could be due to hopes raised and dashed by different administrations. Or because people have seen impunity go unpunished so often that they have become jaded or sceptical or even disillusioned. Whatever the reasons, it is important to keep alive the campaign to significantly reduce corruption in Nigeria. And in doing this, we will need to expand the toolkit of the anti-corruption crusaders as these two events affirm. We definitely need more than the disproportionate emphasis on law and order of the last 25 years. This is not to say we should undo the laws or slow down on enforcement/sanctions. No. But we need to spend more time on the not-so-sexy work of prevention, research and strategy.
We need to make it difficult for people to engage in corrupt practices by putting in place, and constantly strengthening, mechanisms and systems that checkmate corruption before it happens. Preventing corruption is not headline-grabbing but it is cheaper. We also need to significantly hike the cost of engaging in corrupt practices. As is often said: corruption is not a crime of passion but a crime of calculation—perpetrators do cost-benefit analysis and weigh their chances. Where the cost is low and the benefit is high, you know what will happen, especially where it doesn’t take much effort to undertake or conceal.
Systems and laws do not implement or enforce themselves. They are implemented and enforced by humans whose actions are dictated, sometimes subliminally, by how they have been socialised. This is why it will also be critical to focus on how to change entrenched values that predispose people to, or drive, corrupt practices. Behaviours are what we see, more like the tip of an iceberg. Beneath behaviours are bigger and deeper elements: attitudes, belief systems and values. We need to dive deep to understand what is there.
So, merely telling people to change their behaviours through clever play with words or some fancy behavioural change campaign without addressing the values that define and motivate them may not amount to more than empty preachments. We need to surface the norms that drive action and know what buttons to press to make the difference. It is going to be some tough and persistent work, needing a lot of probing, nuance, rigour and reflection. But it is a necessary and worthwhile work, if the goal is to slay the monster of corruption in our country.
Credit:This Day