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Africa: A Culture of Accountability
AfricaFocus Bulletin
Jun 13, 2006 (060613)
(Reposted from sources cited below)
Editor's Note
"In truth serious debate about the manner in which Africa was
governed only became mainstream after the end of the Cold war.
Prior to this human rights, democracy, freedom of expression and
other basic freedoms of ordinary citizens often took a back seat to
the grand geopolitical struggles that were played out on African
soil. It was thus somewhat disconcerting for many of our leaders to
find themselves being lectured about good governance in the early
1990s by the very same Western patrons who had previously supported
some of the most corrupt and oppressive regimes on the continent."
- John Githongo
Speaking at this month's launch of the new TrustAfrica foundation
(http://www.trustafrica.org) based in Dakar, Senegal, Kenyan anticorruption
campaigner called for a "culture of accountability"
around the continent. The foundation - a combination of brain trust
and trust fund - has emerged from the Ford Foundation's Special
Initiative for Africa. But with African leadership on both board
and staff, and the goal of raising resources from the global
African diaspora as well as other traditional "donors," the
founders hope it can mark a new stage in African non-governmental
initiatives to address the continent's problems.
TrustAfrica's executive director is Akwasi Aidoo. The board of
trustees also includes Fouad Abdelmoumni, Akwe Amosu, Adhiambo
Odaga, Gerry Salole, and Bahru Zewde. It is currently recruiting
for multiple staff positions at its Dakar headquarters.
This AfricaFocus Bulletin contains the text of Mr. Githongo's
speech at the launch, reproduced from Pambazuka News
(http://www.pambazuka.org), and brief excerpts from TrustAfrica's
mission statement on its website. For more information, visit
http://www.trustafrica.org.
++++++++++++++++++++++end editor's note+++++++++++++++++++++++
Promoting a Culture of Accountability in Africa
John Githongo
TrustAfrica
http://www.trustafrica.org
[Reproduced here from Pambazuka News
http://www.pambazuka.org/en/issue/258]
Tuesday [June 6] marked the launch of Trust Africa, a new
foundation based in Dakar, Senegal that will focus on conflict
resolution, trade,and increasing democracy in Africa. Trust Africa
has been operating for the past five years as part of the Ford
Foundation, but will now be run independently from Dakar with an
all-African board of directors. In the speech below, given to mark
the launch of the foundation, John Githongo discusses democracy and
governance on the African continent.
Speech to mark the launch of TrustAfrica in Dakar, Senegal on 6
June 2006
Honourable Minister, trustees and officials of TrustAfrica, friends
at the Ford Foundation, Ladies and Gentlemen
I would like to take this opportunity to thank TrustAfrica for
honouring me with the invitation to make this address here today
during the auspicious occasion of their formal launch here in their
new home in Dakar, Senegal. The Trust arrives at a critical time
with an important mandate to address issues that have always been
at the forefront of public consciousness but which in today's
environment find increasingly articulate and urgent expression. I
am doubly honoured to participate in what is clearly a special
moment for TrustAfrica and all who have worked so hard to make this
special African initiative possible.
I was asked to make a few remarks about the opportunities that
exist for improving governance and accountability in Africa and I
shall limit my comments to those broad issues.
In truth serious debate about the manner in which Africa was
governed only became mainstream after the end of the Cold war.
Prior to this human rights, democracy, freedom of expression and
other basic freedoms of ordinary citizens often took a back seat to
the grand geopolitical struggles that were played out on African
soil. It was thus somewhat disconcerting for many of our leaders to
find themselves being lectured about good governance in the early
1990s by the very same Western patrons who had previously supported
some of the most corrupt and oppressive regimes on the continent.
By the mid-1990s, on the heels of the macro-economic adjustments of
the 1980s, governance - the fight against corruption in particular
- had become central to the international development agenda as it
was expressed in regard to Africa. By the end of the 1990s - 1997
in particular - the multilateral institutions were including
governance- related conditionalities in their lending programmes
and the bilaterals followed suit.
South African independence in 1994 saw the beginning of African
attempts to reclaim the governance agenda. I would argue that the
NEPAD initiative - its African Peer Review Mechanism in particular
- is the most direct and potentially most successful instrument
available for African to truly take ownership of this agenda. This
is bolstered by the African Union's gentle slide away from the
principle of non-interference in the affairs of sovereign nations
especially when those sovereign African nations are led by groups
intent on murdering significant numbers of their own populations.
In truth we have been interfering quietly in each others affairs
for a long time, mainly using our intelligence services. The time
has come to interfere face-to-face and above the table to bolster
the cause of democracy and good governance and, most importantly,
to urgently intervene when situations go berserk and fear consumes
populations.
Political accountability in practice
One of the most interesting issues to arise as a result of the
spate of peaceful transitions across the continent since the
mid-1990s has been that of political accountability. There has been
a sense historically that a nation's top leadership were somehow
not accountable and impunity attended to decision-making especially
with regard to the management of public finances. This has changed.
Just as we have had an unprecedented number of retired heads of
state since the mid 1990s so too we have seen the establishment of
commissions of inquiry into past human rights abuses and economic
crimes and other transitional justice mechanisms. There are likely
to be more of these in the coming few years and this is perhaps an
interesting area for an institution like TrustAfrica to focus, at
the very least to ensure that every new regime does not immediately
embark on a witch hunt of its predecessors. Still, the key question
that will continue to reverberate is to whom does the President
answer and how? It is not unlikely that leaders will continue to
get caught out by the media; find themselves under increased
scrutiny of civil society and caught up by processes aimed at
stemming newly urgent problems such as money laundering and
terrorist finance. This is especially likely to be true of oil
exporting countries.
One of the things that has always impressed me about many public
figures in Asia when they are found to have abused the public trust
is their public demonstrations of regret, contrition, shame and
even tears before cameras. This culture does not yet exist for us
here. Attitudes are still quite brazen. Partly as a result public
confidence in leaders is low and around the world our leaders are
often objects of derision, presented as greedy, corrupt and
oppressive. The expectations of Africans with regard to their
leaders is also broadly not one that suggests they expect altruism
to drive decision-making and therefore opt for the second best of
hanging around to see what they can gain directly for themselves
and their families. This is changing, partly as a result of
demography and a younger population with expectations driven by
global imperatives. It also the case that the democratic tradition
has truly kicked in across the continent. Despite challenges no one
reasonable harks back to the one party state or military rule.
Maybe we are yet to see a leader stand up and agree to having
looted the public purse and express contrition for it. More
importantly perhaps we could be moving to a situation where the
leader who gets thus caught out does not enjoy the spontaneous and
determined support of his or her people who rally to their cause
because they perceive them to be victims of an ethnic witch hunt.
Regional integration as a tool for political accountability
I should like to argue that regional integration may potentially
hold out the most important opportunity for improving political
accountability across the continent. There is a sense in which some
of the internal political contradictions - especially within some
of the smaller landlocked countries within Africa - will only be
resolved when these nations become integral parts of larger
entities. And so one would hope that one day very soon, for
example, Rwanda and Burundi will be part of a wider East African
political entity. This would also put paid to the backward theories
that are sometimes bandied about to the effect that tribalism in
some African countries is so acute that we need to create tribally
homogenous states.
Similarly, with regard to the dispensation of justice one would
hope to see regional higher and supreme courts and other regional
judicial instruments and processes coming into being that are
perhaps less subject to the vagaries of internal national political
challenges that can sometimes be vexatious in the extreme. On the
other hand it can also be argued pragmatically that regional
institutions will provide us with an opportunity to promote
politicians who are sometimes reluctant to let go of national
positions and institutions; we can promote retired Presidents to
play useful roles at the regional level when they reach the point
of diminishing returns nationally.
Development with Equity
But the most interesting and I should like to argue critical issue
that TrustAfrica and similar institutions can assist many nations
in Africa address is 'development with equity'. There is a sense in
which development with equity especially in our highly heterogenous
societies become a discredited concept in the mid-1980s when we
were all structurally adjusted; it was dismissed as an outmoded
socialist concept whose time had ended with the failure of some of
the ambitious political and economic experiments of the Cold War
years.
The political and economic programmes implemented at independence
to promote the redistribution of wealth in light of the structural
and institutionalised inequalities of the colonial era had
stagnated by the early 1980s and lost credibility as a result of
the inefficiency, incompetence and corruption that came with them
- state owned enterprises in particular. The ostensible donor
designed replacement programmes have been implemented
half-heartedly and therefore perhaps less successfully. Indeed,
macroeconomic stability has finally come to Africa at the beginning
of the 21st century, but the pressing issues of political economy
- equity in particular - remain unresolved. More than two decades
since adjustment we have democratised but seem to have lost the
intellectual will and machinery to grapple with the major equity
issues facing the continent - the fact that even where economic
growth has been rapid especially as a result of mineral wealth -
the distribution of this wealth has been extremely unequal. People
are afraid of being called socialists at a time when even in Europe
the distinctions between Left and Right in terms of economic policy
have become blurred. This is doubly problematic for us in Africa
because inequality quickly finds regional, ethnic, tribal and
religious expressions that complicate the politics in an extreme
way. Most importantly it leads to the perception that closeness to
the state creates and sustains elites on the basis of kinship ties
and therefore governance is all about my tribe or my group or my
family assuming the levers of power so that they can eat.
For a long time the prevailing philosophy said that the tribe had
been overtaken by the nation; Gikuyus were overtaken by Kenyans;
Yorubas by Nigerians; Hutus by Rwandese etc. In fact this
philosophy was taken a step further when single party states were
created to save us from the dangers of too many political parties
that quickly assumed tribal characters. The detribalisation
political experiment seemed to have failed in many places. Despite
the national language; national anthem; national schools and of
course the national single leaders; the tribe and its baggage
refused to go away. In fact it started to become clear that within
the single detribalising party those from this or that family or
this or that tribe or region seemed to wield a disproportionate
amount of power and similarly the economic benefits of development
seemed to go to one group more than all the others.
The principle of disadvantaged groups; of affirmative action; of
the better off providing for those who don't have so much was never
one to be discussed seriously. Instead boils of resentment were
allowed to fester and explode into calls for sovereign conferences
and rebel groups claiming their rightful share of wealth they
consider to be more theirs than anyone else's. And this is
happening at a time when there is an increasing acknowledgment of
the stark inequalities of globalisation at least in the short term.
The problem for our states that have been independent for around
half a century is that globalisation's short term is our long term,
and besides that we have watched as the Asians seem to have reduced
poverty dramatically within the same time we have managed to deepen
it here. So African impatience is not going to go away.
It just so happens that some tribes are richer than others - by
mistake of history, access to markets, education, climate or
sometimes because they happen to sit on huge deposits of some
precious commodity that can be dug up and sold; or - because they
wield the levers of power and can control that precious commodity
that's dug up and sold. The sharing of resources seems to be
discussed with greatest clarity as a result of a crisis - when one
group has expressed its dissatisfaction with the status quo in a
manner that undermines central authority. Be it oil, gold, diamonds
or water - the shape of states will be moulded by these resource
issues. One would hope that the principle of equity will inform the
outcomes of the debates that are underway and those that are yet to
happen upon us. TrustAfrica from its vantage point here in Senegal
is uniquely placed to inform and help to shape this debate, to
frankly address the equity issues that we have tried to sometimes
sweep under the political carpet.
The Durability of Embedded Corruption Networks
Finally, a word about corruption. Too often discussions about
governance are overtaken by the corruption debate. In part this is
because it is such a vexatious issue in Africa - vexatious because
even though it may not be worse than in other parts of the world
the starkness of the inequalities in yields in Africa and the fact
that those inequalities find ethnic, tribal and regional expression
makes it a particularly compelling political reality. It is also
the case that a few African leaders have been spectacularly
colourful and excessive in their stealing. Embedded corruption
networks on the continent consisting of civil servants,
politicians, businessmen/ brokers and security/defence sector
officials have remained influential since the Cold War when most of
them were engineered. In my experience with the new increased focus
in Africa on the oil sector there is an urgency for accountability
with regard to these resources more than ever before.
TrustAfrica will find that in the holding of public officials to
account on the continent, especially with regard to the management
of resources, the media will be at the cutting edge. Indeed, the
media remains the first and most incisive tool of public
accountability. The importance of media and information generally
in this age of information technology that has democratised access
to information between the First and Third Worlds and which has
considerably enhanced the capacity of media and civil society
cannot be underplayed.
I should like to conclude by pointing to a number of lessons from
my experience where corruption is concerned:
- National security and the procurement processes it derives is
the last refuge of the corrupt. Extractive industries and
communications are also open to spectacular abuse.
- Political financing will become an increasingly troubling issue.
Who pays for democracy in Africa?
- Presidential accountability is key and only constitutional
reform can make this happen.
- Failure of the prosecutory authorities led to the creation of
anti- graft agencies across Africa at the behest of development
partners.
- It sometimes appears as if in the Third World that the
multilaterals are engineered to deal with authoritarian regimes.
They are also faced with a glaring contradiction vis-…-vis
governance: for them success is measured by the amount of money
they lend or donate, the size of the programme they develop for a
country. This imperative can sometimes contradict some of the
executive measures they would need to encourage with regard to
governance issues generally and anti- corruption matters
specifically.
- Restitution is more important than prosecution in the fight
against corruption.
Despite some setbacks and bizarre developments across the
continent, in Africa we are learning that public service means we
serve the people and not an individual; that the public no longer
accept that weary excuse of the past that one received orders from
above to break the law or abuse public trust in any way. So a
culture of political accountability may be beginning to take root.
It will lead I believe, in the coming years to increasing calls for
greater Presidential accountability in particular which might be
expressed in the constitutional reform processes. This will be a
positive development with wider implications where despite
generally positive developments on the democratisation front
ultimate presidential accountability is something we are only
starting to learn.
Finally, the setbacks on the democratic front in Africa are not
causing a generalised feeling of decline, despondency and failure
the maturing democracy thus far seems able to absorb the shocks.
The TrustAfrica launch is yet another demonstration of this
maturing. It is an honour to share this special occasion with all
of you
Thank-you.
TrustAfrica
Who We Are: Our Mission
TrustAfrica seeks to strengthen African initiatives that address
the most difficult challenges confronting the continent. We
currently focus on three critical areas:
- Resolving conflicts and securing peace;
- Promoting inclusive policies on citizenship and identity; and
- Advancing economic integration.
TrustAfrica works principally through collaboration and partnership
with like-minded institutions and donors. As a catalyst and
convener, we are committed to generating and testing new ideas. We
also strive to practice good governance and promote it among our
grantees.
Our History
TrustAfrica, first known as the Special Initiative for Africa,
began in 2001 under the aegis of the Ford Foundation. Our premise
was that Africans need a greater voice in the international donor
community as well as philanthropic resources that Africans control.
...
In mid-2006, TrustAfrica will become a truly African foundation
with the opening of our new headquarters in Dakar, Senegal. The
Ford Foundation continues to provide support, but we are now an
independent organization governed solely by Africans. TrustAfrica
is recognized in the United States as a 501(c)(3) tax-exempt
organization and in Mauritius as a Global Business Company
(category 2) with charitable status.
Our Core Values
At TrustAfrica, we believe in:
- facilitating collaboration among African institutions and
building long-term relationships with grantees;
- maintaining the highest standards of institutional performance,
including sound management, accountable and transparent governance,
effective communication, and sustainable results; and
- forging closer ties with the African diaspora to strengthen
global alliances for Africa.
AfricaFocus Bulletin is an independent electronic publication
providing reposted commentary and analysis on African issues, with
a particular focus on U.S. and international policies. AfricaFocus
Bulletin is edited by William Minter.
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