by Guy Arnold
When Obasanjo came to power in 1999 he introduced anti-corruption legislation and suspended controversial oil contracts that had been awarded by the Abacha government as it stepped down. He sent envoys to London, Washington and other capitals to seek access to Abacha’s bank accounts. The Swiss government froze four accounts, three in Geneva and one in Zurich. Abacha and his associates had siphoned off at least US$2.2 billion, which the government hoped to recover. Meanwhile, the new Assembly voted itself a US$25,000–US$35,000 furniture allowance at a time when the minimum wage per month was US$30. As Maier points out, a known incorruptible is not supported for office by his local community ‘because he won’t eat and he won’t let us eat’. This book paints a particular portrait of Nigeria but one that is familiar to people who know the country. When Nigerians are told that their country is regarded as the most corrupt in the world, they reply: ‘This is how we do things in Nigeria.’25
According to a Congolese, the story of Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) (formerly Zaïre) is one long tale of corruption. At the top under Mobutu it was a matter of state kleptocracy. Mobutu ensured that his supporting clique all became corrupt and, therefore, were complicit in his corruption and consequently pliable. Lower down the scale survival depended upon corrupt practices of one kind or another. Further, the mineral wealth of the Congo has corrupted almost every outsider who has become involved in the country – Belgium, France, the US, the neighbouring states, multinational corporations – each after their ‘share’ of its wealth. Once money was seen as the ‘goal’ that everyone pursued in order to be anyone then how it was obtained became of secondary importance. Moreover, if the leaders and ‘big men’ are seen to be overtly corrupt, why not everyone else? Whatever the role of outsiders, they cannot operate without the willing complicity of Congolese nationals. The corrupted and the corrupters feed on each other and such a society breeds plenty of people who want to be corrupted. At the end of the Mobutu era corruption had reached an all-time high. ‘The corrupters, of course, have no respect for diplomatic niceties such as national sovereignty and territorial integrity that may stand in the way of short-term profitability. They make deals with whoever controls a mineral-rich territory, including warlords and invaders, as they have done in the Congo with the AFDL, Rwanda, the Ugandan warlord Brig. James Kazimi, both wings of the RCD and the MLC. For the African partners, all that does matter is the amount of money foreign businesses are prepared to pay up front to win lucrative contracts, and the percentage of earnings that will later go back to political authorities or warlords.’26 Corruption and wealth on the scale of the Congo will draw participants into the scramble for a share from all over the world. ‘In one transaction in May 1997, the AFDL received an initial payment of US$50 million from Consolidated European Ventures of the Lundin Group of Vancouver, Canada, for a copper and cobalt investment deal worth US$1.5 billion, with the remainder US$200 million to be paid over four years.’27
Africa’s endless wars are natural breeding grounds for greed and corruption. In a climate of violence and endless uncertainty it is not surprising that people are tempted to take anything they can as a hedge against an uncertain future. In wars, ‘Moreover, there is nothing like greed to forge the social networks needed to overcome problems of scale and co-ordination. In other words, the true cause of much civil war is not the loud discourse of grievance, but the silent force of greed.’28 In war after war – Liberia and Sierra Leone in the 1990s are good examples as was the carve-up of Democratic Republic of Congo by its predatory neighbours – greed is the driving force. If they can, the ordinary people try to distance themselves from the fighting though too rarely do they succeed in doing so. These wars do not serve justice or solve problems, no matter what reasons were advanced for the original involvement of participants. Rather, the warlords manipulate the people into fighting for an apparent cause while they are only concerned with their own enrichment and power. These wars are financed by the illegal sale of looted resources – diamonds, coffee, coltan – and in the background are the Western money-launderers and arms companies who service the warlords and ask no awkward questions.
THE END OF THE RAWLINGS REVOLUTION IN GHANA
The corruption of Rawlings’ Ghana can be seen as a classic story of revolutionary zeal turning into autocratic cronyism. At the personal level, Rawlings’ ‘wild streak’ that had made him such a charismatic reformer when he first seized power, in his later career at the end of the century only appeared mean-spirited. By 2000,
As corruption soared and life became harder, particularly for urbanites, the former foot-soldiers of the ‘revolution’, increasingly marginalized, became disillusioned; with increasing policy distortion, the alliance with business also frayed. The fall-off of donor patronage tightened the crisis. The unemployed and marginalized youth of Accra and the towns, the trade unions and students – in some respects the very social forces that had propelled the ‘Rawlings revolution’ almost 20 years earlier – came together with other interests in a ‘democratic revolution’ to expel the regime.29
This scenario typifies the end to which so many reforming regimes come, so much so as to raise the bleak query as to whether the natural state is one of corruption, the revolutionary state merely an aberration from the norm. Prior to Rawlings, Ghanaians had seen the Acheampong regime as deeply corrupt, a corruption shared by the armed forces. The coups of 4 June 1979 and 31 December 1981 were marked by the implosion of the armed forces. ‘It was an indication of the malaise in the Ghana Armed Forces that on both occasions only a small handful of ranks and junior officers were able to overthrow the military hierarchy.’ Corruption had made it ripe for collapse.30 Fighting corruption can all too easily become counter-productive because the anti-corruption forces themselves become corrupt. This happened, for example, with the Timber Task Forces (TTF) that were responsible for controlling illegal felling and logging. They became laws to themselves, used violence, raided villages and sawmills and indulged in illegal sales of logs in order to enrich themselves until they were abolished by the Minister for Lands and Mineral Resources.
Aid played its part in subverting self-help schemes to make them dependent instead upon inputs from outside. But, most disturbingly, a regime that had begun by tackling the country’s blatant corruption and had made great headway in eradicating a great deal of it, later saw its elite become like their military predecessors, and begin to erode the ascetic image that had been the hallmark of the Rawlings revolution. By the end of the 1990s ‘Commissions on state contracts destined for the coffers of the NDC (National Democratic Congress) were alleged to be widespread (estimated at 10–15 per cent of contract values), as were demands that businesses large and small make contributions to the NDC; the price for this was the growing number of abandoned or poorly finished projects.’31 It is not easy to explain such a descent into the corrupt practices that had justified the Rawlings coups in the first place. There are various possibilities: a deeply entrenched cultural affinity with corruption; lack of any clear accountability in administrative structures; underpaid civil servants improving their lot; or forced privatization providing easy opportunities for quick personal gains? There is also a danger that dictatorial regimes always give rise to, and that is the readiness to ignore the law and act arbitrarily and if the government is doing this in one direction the temptation for ordinary citizens to enrich themselves arbitrarily should not be ignored. In the early Rawlings years whatever corruption took place was carefully concealed but this changed after the 1992 elections for the party (NDC) had opened its doors to moneyed individuals in order to finance its campaign, and these newcomers were not ascetic reformers but carpetbaggers. According to reports of the Serious Fraud Squad corruption and embezzlement became widespread in the District Assemblies. By 1999 activists had become sufficiently disillusioned with the Rawlings government and the NDC that a section of the party broke away to form a separate party, the Reform Movement. By this time the revolutionary party that had fought cor
ruption and eschewed foreign aid had, instead, become dependent upon aid. When an African state relies upon aid rather than its own resources it becomes an adjunct, a form of local government, in the global, Western-controlled economic order and this had happened to Ghana. Nyerere had warned against this in his 1967 Arusha Declaration but his warning had been largely ignored, including in the end, by Tanzania itself. The Ghana story is especially instructive because the corruption of power was most noticeable in Rawlings, the charismatic, ascetic revolutionary who wanted to clean up his country but found by 1998 that a reform movement inside his own party was calling for an end to corruption and sycophancy. As usual, the international aid community played its part in this transformation. Rawlings’ original populism resulted from his emphasis upon the moral rectitude of the poor majority and his attack upon elite corruption. Such an attitude did not endear his Provisional National Defence Council (PNDC) to donors and creditors who were naturally opposed to people’s socialism in any form. Once Rawlings had turned to the World Bank, whose darling he became in the 1980s, aid donors and multilateral agencies sighed with relief and corruption once more reared its head.
Forms of corruption vary from country to country. In Kenya, for example, President Moi constantly agreed to economic reforms or human rights improvements as suggested by donors but once the aid had been released ignored or positively reneged on his promises. In this case the real corruption was that of the donors who knew how he would behave yet provided the aid anyway, thus reducing their ethical stands to a hypocritical charade. A Kenya-donor ritual grew up during the Moi years: Kenya was promised aid; the government refused to reform as required; the aid donors threatened to withhold the aid; Kenya implemented ‘reforms’, that were not subsequently carried out; the aid was delivered. On the other side of the continent in Côte d’Ivoire the austerity measures announced in 1990 led to popular attacks upon elite corruption that was not affected by such measures. The most preposterous corruption of all concerned the megalomania of the country’s octogenarian ruler Houphouët-Boigny spending half the country’s wealth in the construction of Notre Dame de la Paix, a gilded copy of St Peter’s (Rome), in Houphouët-Boigny’s home village of Yamoussoukro at a cost of US$300 million (the cost had doubled from the original estimate). When the ruler of Guinea, Sekou Touré, died in 1984, the military took control and, while bringing an end to the corruption of the presidential elite, they deregulated the plundering of the state and made corruption open to all. One of Africa’s supreme warlords was Charles Taylor of Liberia, known in his ministerial days under Samuel Doe as ‘superglue’. His activities helped corrupt Liberia’s neighbours Burkina Faso and Sierra Leone. Taylor’s ambition was to wrest from Doe the royalties of the world’s largest commercial shipping fleet and the rents to be earned from narco-dollars passing through Liberia. Taylor offered a stake in the enterprise to Joseph Momoh, the President of Sierra Leone, but he offered his services to the highest bidder who turned out to be Samuel Doe. Following Doe’s death and Taylor’s ascendancy in Liberia, he punished Momoh by starting a rebellion in Sierra Leone where, of course, he had his eyes on the diamonds.32
SOUTHERN AFRICA
Before Mozambique began getting massive doses of aid in the second half of the 1990s, its public sector management and legal system ‘may have been basic and unimaginative, but at least they were not ravaged by corruption, loss of good staff, demoralization, legal decay and rampant gangsterism’.33 A sad story from Mozambique is that of Francisco Langa, a FRELIMO hero of the liberation war who in 1980 succumbed to accepting a bribe but then committed suicide rather than face his comrades. ‘Two decades later, however, officials with big houses and cars flaunt the money stolen from the aid programme. The shift in culture from Puritanism to self-seeking greed has been rapid and dramatic. In the early 1990s Mozambique was the poorest country in the world. ‘Steadily corruption became endemic, as people struggled to survive, while all around them were wealthy foreigners and large amounts of aid. And aid workers anxious to get their projects going without being delayed by what they saw as Mozambican “bureaucracy” were only too happy to allow rules to be ignored at the cost of a small bribe or turning a blind eye to some aid being diverted.’34 By 1999 the issue of corruption had become a topic for debate for it was recognized that the country had become deeply corrupted. During the floods of 2000, the country rose above it.
We had no reports of significant diversions of aid, and many reports of integrity and selflessness. But Mozambique has established a new and unenviable reputation with donors so there were efforts to avoid a corruption which was now expected. This ranged from the South African decision to send goods rather than money to attempts by a number of small agencies to do their own distribution, allegedly because they feared corruption, but more often because they wanted to control the distribution.35
In his book about the machinations of Enron, the US company whose collapse in 2002 represented the biggest corruption scandal in US corporate history, Vijay Prashad recounts a story about its activities in Mozambique and, more important, the efforts of the US government to support it. The US readiness to lecture developing countries about their corruption does not sit well with the following episode. In 1995 Mozambique sought investment to develop its Pande offshore gas field. The best two bids were from South Africa’s SASOL and Argentina’s Plus Petrol. Then Enron stepped in and worked to replace SASOL and was backed in its attempt by the US. At that time US$1.1 billion of Mozambique’s US$1.5 billion budget was financed by foreign aid and of this amount US$40 million came from USAID. John Kachamila, the Minister of Mineral Resources, told the following story which was published in the Houston Chronicle:
There were outright threats to withhold development funds if we didn’t sign (the deal with Enron) and sign soon. Their diplomats, especially Mike McKinley (deputy chief of the US Embassy), pressured me to sign a deal that was not good for Mozambique. He was not a neutral diplomat. It was as if he was working for Enron. We got calls from American senators threatening us with this and that if we didn’t sign. Anthony Lake (US national security adviser) even called to tell us to sign… Enron was forever playing games with us and the embassy was forever threatening to withdraw aid.
A study commissioned by the World Bank found that many of Mozambique’s concerns were warranted. The view of an unnamed State Department official is also quoted: ‘This project represents tax revenue, hard currency earnings in a big way for the Mozambique state… If the Mozambicans think they can kill this deal and we will keep dumping money into this place, they should think again.’ It was at this time that Anthony Lake wrote to President Chissano to say that the US would not release US$13.5 million in aid funds unless Mozambique accepted the Enron bid.36 When the subject of African corruption in relation to aid is raised such brutal arm-twisting by the US State Department should be seen as part of a two-way corruption process where all the cards are in the hands of the donor. Reverberations of the Enron scandal continued through 2003 when, for example, six major Western banks including Barclays Bank, Deutsche Bank and Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce were implicated for their alleged knowledge of what Enron was doing. The United States, Britain, Germany and Canada are among the world’s leading aid donors that regularly lecture African recipients about corruption.
Political corruption, the unsanctioned use of public resources for private ends, is regarded as endemic when it becomes open and routine. South Africa since 1994 has certainly not been seen as one of the continent’s most corrupt countries by a long way but plenty of petty corruption has been recorded. Pension frauds between 1994 and 1998, in the form of ghost or double claimants, accounted for R5 billion while police corruption (which was endemic in the apartheid era) did not improve: partly this was ascribed to demoralization and disloyalty to the new regime. In 1998 10,000 policemen out of a force of 140,000 were under investigation on charges of bribery, theft, fraud and involvement in crime syndicates. According to the accountants Deloitte and Touc
he, losses by public sector fraud in 1998 probably exceeded R10 billion. Between 1994 and 1998 the government lost up to R20 billion as a result of corrupt employee behaviour. In 1998 the Special Investigative Unit headed by Judge Willem Heath claimed that the R10 billion it was investigating represented only 5 per cent of the total though this went back to instances of corruption prior to 1994. In 1999 the government-sponsored National Anti-Corruption Summit resolved to establish a National Anti-Corruption Forum. Two years later it was only just ready to function. South Africa’s provincial governments are open to corruption and difficult to monitor since departments keep disciplinary procedures secret. Neither does the government welcome civil society anti-corruption initiatives. In November 2000, for example, the Minister of Safety and Security, Steve Tshwete, rejected proposals for a private sector agency to monitor police corruption – the police had its own unit for the purpose. Nonetheless, in 1998 and 1999 the government hosted two major anti-corruption conferences and all political parties, including the ANC, focused on this issue during the election campaigns. The extent of police corruption in South Africa is seen as alarming given the role the police ought to play in rooting out corruption. In early 1999, of the 80,000 cases the Special Investigative Unit under Judge Heath was investigating, only two or three cases had been referred to it by the government, a clear indication that investigating corruption was not a government priority. Thus, while the government was seen to denounce the evils of corruption it was not seen to pursue corrupt practices with any obvious conviction. This reluctance to pursue corruption was borne out in the case of Andrew Feinstein, an ANC MP, whose over-keen pursuit of corruption led to his removal from an investigative committee. This was justified under party discipline: ‘Some people have the notion that Public Accounts Committee members should act in a non-partisan way. But in our system no ANC member has a free vote.’37 The party, clearly, would look after its own. As the same authority claims: ‘The political will to punish corruption in high quarters remains inconsistent – and nonexistent in certain provincial governments. Though elected politicians have occasionally lost office as a result of corruption accusations, not a single ANC minister or parliamentarian has been charged with or convicted for a corruption-related political offence.’38