Moses Ochonu
28 November 2008
opinion
Moses Ochonu analyses the dominant discourse on corruption in Africa. By challenging conventional explanations and assignations of corruption to the cultural realm, he makes it clear that whereas the phenomenon is by no means endemic to the continent, the effects clearly more devastating in Africa. He advocates for a shift away from deterministic explanations of corruption in Africa, and a move towards a better understanding of the fundamental structural poverty of Africa and the economic disadvantages into which history, geography, and subaltern experiences if corruption is to be addressed in a meaningful way.
Corruption has acquired the status of a continental emergency in Africa. But this is not another pontification on corruption. Rather, it is a polemical disavowal of a few popular stereotypes and fallacies on corruption in Africa. It is laced, for good measure, with a few contrarian perspectives on the phenomenon.
One of the most insightful attempts to explain the cultural basis of political corruption in Africa contends that patronage ties between regular Africans and the political elite place informal obligations and demands on the latter, obligations which are often fulfilled through corrupt enrichment. Corruption in this explanation has many participants besides the politician or bureaucrat who actually engages in the act. It is an explanation that understands corruption through the prism of mass complicity and cultural toleration.
This explanation captures some of the reality of corruption in Africa. The typical African politician does not only grapple with financial pressure from family but also from kin, clan, hometown, and ethnic constituents. Indeed, the network of people that makes corrupt acts possible and sometimes undetectable includes not just politicians and state bureaucrats but also family members, friends, ethically challenged financial and legal experts, and traditional institutions of restraint. In Africa, corruption is indeed a group act.
Because of the absence of state welfare institutions in much of Africa, political constituents expect politicians representing them to cater to their quotidian and small-scale infrastructural needs. It is generally understood and quietly tolerated that a politician has to rely on his informal access to public funds to satisfy these informal requests for patronage and largesse. Many Africans euphemistically call this "patronage politics." They may tolerate and normalize it as African grassroots politics. To Western observers, it is corruption at its crudest.
One can argue that this is a product of the nexus of over-centralized power, access to resources, and ethnic competition (which are features of most African countries), but this hardly accounts for the multi-ethnic and socially diverse cast of actors in most corruption scandals in Africa. Or for the fact that in much of continent, corruption is often the reason why overly centrist, patrimonial, and illogical states endure and not vice versa. The tragedy of many African countries--Nigeria particularly stands out--is that corruption and patronage politics are the recurring baselines of political compromise and consensus among self-interested but bitterly divided political elites.
True as it may be, it is very easy to overtate the argument about how the nature of the states inherited from colonial times sustains corruption in Africa. Such an overstatement often elides more socially embedded, low-level, and less obvious platforms that support and legitimize corrupt acts--or at least make them seem normal. This pseudo-cultural normalization of corruption is one of the biggest obstacles in the way entrenching transparency in government bureaucracies in Africa.
Nothing encapsulates this reality more than the pervasive Nigerian fad of traditional chieftaincy institutions dolling out titles to citizens whose source of wealth is questionable at best. What does one make of African universities that routinely give out honorary degrees to patently corrupt donors? Or churches and mosques that project demonstrably corrupt members as models of piety, accomplishment, and Godly favour?
What these practices do is to invest and implicate many Africans indirectly in the phenomenon of corruption. They are subtle and invidious, but they work to co-opt many Africans, even without their self-conscious consent, into the cultural and religious contexts in which corrupt acts and corrupt persons find rehabilitation and validation.
The result is that many Africans, even while expressing outrage against corruption privately, are publicly indifferent to its manifestation, especially if they are situated in social networks that benefit from the patronage politics through which corruption thrives. As a result they may feel too culturally complicit to take a stand. This kind of complicity makes official policy against corruption difficult because it mitigates the public pressure necessary for official action against corruption.
But Africans also draw clear moral lines in their narrative on corruption. Their tolerance for patronage and its lubrication by state resources does not prevent them from condemning the abuse of this kind of politics by greedy politicians. Nor does it blind them to the political excess of treasury looting for purely personal enrichment. The distinction between patronage and brazen theft of state funds may not always be clear, and one may morph into the other, but Africans recognize the destructive impact of the latter, and the moral evil that it represents. They know enough to make a distinction between the politician who practices vulgar populism with state funds and the one who stuffs his local and foreign bank accounts with budgeted funds meant for capital investments. The two forms of political behaviour do not affect Africa's economies to the same degree. This is not a pedantic distinction. It is crucial for separating hysteria from reality.
This complex reality has sometimes been caricatured as mass African complicity in corruption, a kind of racial indictment on Africans, who are allegedly genetically and culturally predisposed to corruption. The more elegant variant of this thinking contends that corruption may be endemic in Africa but that this is because what Westerners call corruption is a historical, ever-present culture of patron-client relationships that are now lubricated, quite understandably, by postcolonial state resources. Some people go so far as to insinuate that Africans do not see corruption as corruption but as a proud, if atavistic, return to an African culture of the big man and his responsibilities. Like all stereotypical renderings of Africa, this argument exaggerates an African social reality for dramatic effect. Indeed, the dramatization and extrapolation of cultural norms that may or may not foster corruption is one of the bedrocks of conventional Western understandings of Africa.
One cannot deny that there is some cultural continuity between the African past and present, but much of the argument about Africa being a natural cultural habitat for corruption is cultural relativism taken too far. Some of it borders dangerously on intellectualized racism. Africans are more cognizant of corruption and its devastating impacts than are other peoples precisely because corruption, in its postcolonial vulgarity, represents a perversion of familiar, largely harmless African practices of political patronage. It is precisely because this perversion is recent, and not historical, that Africans consistently express outrage, even if a largely impotent one, against corruption.
So pervasive is this narrative of mass complicity in corruption in Africa that many Africans themselves have appropriated it as a rhetorical device in their own discourses on corruption. There is a particularly Nigerian spin on this paradigm that must be discredited. It is very common to hear Nigerians argue that no Nigerian is free of the stigma or aura of corruption. It is argued that every Nigerian knows, is related to, or has benefited from someone who is corrupt. The argument is that it is impossible to exculpate oneself from the collective guilt of corruption when one functions in a corrupt system with gradations and varieties of corrupt practices.
But this narrative conflates a wide variety of corrupt practices, assigns them the same impact, and attributes to them the same moral outcomes. In analyzing the impact of corruption on Africa--which should be the focus of anti-corruption anxieties--the distinction between an African politician who fritters away $5 million of his country's funds and a poorly paid policeman who collects a bribe of 50 cents from an erring motorist is a significant one. For it is not the low-level, quotidian acts of corruption--as bad as they are--that are responsible for the egregious impacts of corruption in Africa. It may be hard to organically disentangle those two forms of corruption but it would be analytically disingenuous to equate their impact on African people.
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