The recent sentencing to a jail term of three years for corruption of a former president of France, Nicolas Sarközy, reverberated around the world. It sent a clear message to those in power that indeed, no one is above the law and reaffirmed accountability and probity as bedrocks of responsible governance and a stable democracy. This contrasts sharply with the Nigerian conundrum where corruption has resisted the war against it and where the prevailing culture that venerates public office holders fosters impunity.
Sarközy’s fall offers another lesson to Nigeria’s President, Major General Muhammadu Buhari (retd.), and regime actors on how to fight corruption and build institutions and their importance in fostering a virile, prosperous democracy. Generally speaking, well-established democracies have lower levels of corruption compared to authoritarian regimes or young democracies. Sarközy’s conviction shows that if a regime is democratic, this alone does not guarantee a lack of corruption. It is no accident that France is a First World economy, a nuclear power, advanced democracy and one of the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council. France has shown the way. The UN says, “Government’s responsiveness to the interests and needs of the greatest number of citizens is strictly associated with the capacity of democratic institutions and processes to bolster the dimensions of rights, equality and accountability.”
This was on display in Paris. Sarközy, 66, president from 2007 to 2012, tried alongside two accomplices, was found guilty of corruption and influence peddling, after trying to obtain information from a magistrate about an ongoing investigation into his campaign finances. Though two of the three years jail term is suspended and he will serve his time at home wearing an electronic bracelet, the impartiality of the law and the country’s institutional capacity to bring all offenders to book has been established.
Nigeria’s anti-corruption war is wobbly and ineffectual because of such glaring lack of institutional capacity. There is an elite conspiracy whereby certain past office holders are untouchable and are neither properly investigated nor made to account for their actions and expenditures while in office. And this is not for lack of mind-boggling scandals. Till date, the top actors in former presidents Olusegun Obasanjo’s and Goodluck Jonathan’s administrations have not been made to account for their roles in the ‘$10 billion’ power and N2.53 trillion oil subsidy scandals respectively despite a noisy ongoing “anti-corruption war.” Very few Politically Exposed Persons have been brought to book even though Nigeria accounts for the highest chunk of the $88.6 billion reckoned by the UNDP to be lost yearly through illicit financial flows from Africa. Graft is on display everywhere, from the ports of entry to schools, the security forces and government offices.
Unsurprisingly, Nigeria dropped three places to 149 out of 180 countries in Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index 2020, six years into Buhari’s uncoordinated war on corruption. To be effective, an anti-corruption strategy, said the Brookings Institution, must ensure transparency in financial information and build institutions and processes that block leakages. Most importantly, it said, there must be very strong political will to hold officials accountable and punish those who perpetrate corrupt acts.
Other countries show how: the Transparency and Accountability Initiative tallied 11 world leaders that fell from power amid corruption scandals between 2016 and April 2018. These were in Iceland, Kyrgyzstan, Brazil, Montenegro, South Korea, Pakistan, Zimbabwe, South Africa, Slovakia, Peru, and Mauritius. Israel’s former president, Moshe Katzav, Adrian Nastase, a former prime minister of Romania and Alfonso Portillo, a former president of Guatemala, have each been jailed for corruption. Despite winning back-to-back elections, Israel’s current and longest serving prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, under investigation and indictments for corruption since 2016, was formally charged in May 2020 and his trial is still ongoing.
In the United Kingdom, a scandal over fraudulent expenses claims in 2009 initially indicted 40 Members of Parliament with six eventually bagging jail sentences. It led to reforms in financial processes and greater accountability since then.
One major lesson for Nigeria to learn in Sarközy’s jailing is that the law is no respecter of anyone where institutions are well developed. “According to institutionalism (the study of politics through a focus on formal institutions of government), the factors that have the strongest inhibiting effect on a country’s level of corruption are the character, design and transparency of the political system and its institutions,” the UNODC argues. The country needs therefore to change gear to end endemic corruption that bleeds 40 per cent from all public procurement. There must be no sacred cows, a major drawback to the long-running campaign against graft. All offenders, no matter how highly placed, must be prosecuted. South Korea once sentenced three former presidents in one day; Brazil indicted the popular Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and his successor as president, Dilma Rousseff. Henceforth, crossing over to the ruling party or striking political deals should not confer immunity on PEPs.
There should be buy-in by the judiciary and the people to ensure success. Many corruption suspects are slipping through the judicial net using legal technicalities. The Administration of Criminal Justice Act, devised to fast-track trials and defeat the delay tactics of defence lawyers, has been applied only in the breach. The country urgently needs a law similar to the UK’s Unexplained Wealth Orders that shifts the onus onto a suspect to explain the sources of his assets.
Crucially, the people have also been missing in action: Nigerians are no longer shocked into action by egregious corruption. Yet, TAI noted that popular peaceful mass measures such as the two million South Korean youths that marched to demand the resignation of President Park Geun-hye (now jailed) and similar marches in Slovakia and Hungary that provoked positive anti-corruption measures, are absent in Nigeria. Protests have been held even in authoritarian Russia and China against official corruption. Nigerians should overcome the tendency to shrug off corruption scandals or retreat into sectionalism and sectarianism over graft. They should stop venerating leaders; public office holders are to serve and should be held accountable at all times. The whistleblower mechanism should be revived and the Freedom of Information Act fully exploited by the media, civil society and every citizen.
Ultimately, the responsibility to mobilise state resources and the people, build strong institutional capacity, coordinate the anti-graft war and muster strong political will to make examples of corrupt elite lies with Buhari; he should live up to this expectation.
