Charles Onunaiju

Almost the whole world, including Africans themselves, regard corruption as Africa’s deadliest cankerworm that has undermined sustainable development, sapped her vitality, driven  most of its promising talents and youths to far-flung places and even blighted her prospects.

Yet, Africa’s leaderships have muted its corrosive effects in the past.
In an unusual audacity combined with what appeared like a new political will, the agenda of corruption and its deadly effects on the fortunes of the region was the main theme of the 30th ordinary session of the African Union Summit at its headquarters in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, between the 28th and 29th of January.
“Winning the fight against corruption: A sustainable path to Africa’s transformation,” was the broad theme of the summit. Nigeria’s President Buhari was unanimously charged to lead the fight against the debilitating cancer in Africa’s public life.
The irony of leading Africa’s allegedly most corrupt country has not dented the personal integrity of the former military commander, who is famous for his disinclination to wealth accumulation, a notorious trademark of high office holders. After having held string of high offices or what is usually referred to as “juicy posts,” ranging from provincial governor, petroleum minister and former head of a military regime, he is visibly not rich, a reputation that worked in his favour as the first opposition leader to defeat an incumbent in the more than five decades of Nigeria’s political history.
So, when his summit colleagues asked him to lead the charge against corruption, they probably meant business. But President Buhari’s own experience in the fight against corruption in the past two years since he assumed office is that corruption fights back even more viciously. Therefore, the choice of the theme of the 30th ordinary session of the Africa Union summit to “fight corruption,” cannot  even begin to count as the winding down of the scourge in the region. Asking President Buhari whose two-year rule has put the fight against corruption at the topmost of its agenda to lead the regional war against corruption means the theme is not just another diversionary rhetoric of an organization, some Africans in the past,  have derisively referred to as a Trade Union for the protection of interests of the political rulers of the region.
As Africa’s most well known cankerworm, notorious for the many years it has ravaged the region, Africa’s recent quest for revival and renaissance especially as she is open to business and investment cannot happen on a sustainable basis, except a strong commitment to deal a fatal blow to corruption is matched with credible political will at the highest level. Africa Union, the region’s political clearing-house and its foremost institutional platform for collective action has now decisively thrown its hat in the ring with a fresh focus on the fight against corruption.
What corruption does to Africa is beyond words. It is cruelly devastating. Apart from the illicit flight of capital, it shrinks the space for social and economic opportunity, forcing her most productive population, the youths and even skilled persons to scamper all over the world in search of elusive green pastures. The sustained and high casuality rates of youths drowning in the Mediterranean Sea, trying to cross to Europe, were a tiny part of the social malaise inflicted by corruption in Africa. Clinics and local hospitals with empty drug shelves, peasants scratching bare farmlands without the slightest inputs of modern agricultural equipment, children squatting on bare floors in schools, crime colonies and squalor camps in cities, broken infrastructure and perennial energy crises, electricity outages and many others are eloquent testimonies to the ravages of corruption in Africa. More dangerously is even the threat of corruption to investment in Africa.
According to a study released last year by Mckinsey & company, a renowned global management consortium, entitled “Dance of the lions and dragons: How are Africa and China engaging, and how will the partnership evolve?” it observed that “between 60 and 87 percent of Chinese firms in Africa said they paid “tips” or bribes to obtain a business licence,” and noted that “these bribes exact a real cost on African economies as bribes ultimately lead to higher prices for local consumers as well as lost opportunity as some investors will inevitably take their capital to better-governed markets.”
Nevertheless, the study which “evaluated Africa’s economic partnership with the rest of the world across five dimensions: trade, investment stock, investment growth, infrastructure, financing, and aid,” found that “China is in the top four partners for Africa in all these dimensions,” and drew the conclusion that “no other country in the world matches this depth and breadth of engagement.” And now, that Africa’s top political leadership has declared an intention to combat the scourge of corruption, it can take advantage of the comprehensive partnership which spans wide facets to compare notes with Beijing.
China, for more than five years, has given corruption its deadliest blow ever. General Secretary of the Communist Party of China (CPC), Xi Jinping, who is also the President of the country set out from his tenure in 2012 to trap both the “ tiger and flies,” high level and low-level officials who engage in corrupt practices.
Five years on, even unusual high flying tigers have been brought to book and as even another category, “foxes” who fled the country to escape justice, have been trapped back to face the law. In the report General Secretary, Xi Jinping delivered at the 19th National Congress of the Communist Party of China in October last year: he said that “the fight against corruption remains grave and complex but we must remain as firm as a rock in our resolve to build on the overwhelming momentum and secure a sweeping victory.” Outlining a new framework to confront the scourge, the Chinese leader told party delegates that  “we will strengthen deterrence so officials don’t dare to, strengthen the cage of institutions so they are unable to, and strengthen their vigilance so they have no desire to commit acts of corruption,” and expressed optimism that “our political environment will, through tireless efforts like seas fallen calm and rivers running clear, be clean and free of corruption.”

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Onunaiju is director of the Centre for China Studies,
Abuja, Nigeria.

For Africa to seriously take the bull by the horns and give corruption that deadly punch, it deserves, it can keep a hotline with its ever-reliable friends in Beijing.
Onunaiju is director of the Centre for China Studies
Abuja, Nigeria.