African anti-corruption commissions
- executive summary

This report (full text in pdf) has been developed from the literature review and evaluation presented in the First Report (March, 2004). The findings here are based on the insights gained from five country visits to Ghana, Malawi, Tanzania, Uganda and Zambia (July - October, 2004).

Executive summary content
Lifecycles | measurement | funding | report content | recommendations

Lifecycles and synchronicity

The findings emerged from grouping previous explanations of ACC 'success', the 'inhibitors and drivers' as we term them, and matching them against the realities of the different countries. We grouped the explanations into the following elements:

• governance context
  
• role of governments (both local and donor)
  
• performance of ACCs

…and, most crucially, what we discovered is the missing link in previous studies of ACCs:

• the role of donors in promoting the success or failure of ACCs.

Our study found a lack of synchronicity and compatibility between the needs, aims, motivations, capacities and expectations of governments, donors and ACCs. This leads to a lack of coordination, complementarity and confidence between the three parties, which, in turn, is connected to their differing 'lifecycles'.

Initial high expectations

ACC unable to meet unrealistic expectations

Cuts in funding & impaired org. development

Stakeholder disillusionment

The lifecycle of a new ACC is characterized by initially high expectations from governments and donors but the ACC is an infant organization unable to meet the unrealistic expectations imposed upon it. This failure usually means that there is no sustained support for the ACC which limits its capacity to develop as an organization. This failure 'to thrive' encourages disillusionment in governments, donors and in ACCs themselves.

The lifecycle of governments involves the gradual displacement of anti-corruption as a high priority and indeed political commitment is frequently confined to exposing the crimes of previous regimes. Governments experience periods of instability and, where ACCs investigate corruption at the highest political levels, the response is not often supportive. Rather, ACC Directors are dismissed, authority to prosecute is withheld in sensitive cases and under-resourcing of the ACC becomes the norm, further undermining its capacity and reputation.

When discredited governments are toppled or new leaders emerge, donors become enthusiastic again and the neglected ACC is reborn or reconstituted. Where once donor support had been difficult to obtain, or had even been withdrawn, suddenly there is a rush to support the ACC with a new set of expectations. The previous famine of resources is replaced by a feast but the ACC often lacks the infrastructure and capacity to make effective use of the sudden increase in funds. Donor neglect is, at worst, replaced by donor competition and, at best, by inadequate and irregular donor coordination.

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Appropriate measurement tools

The development cycle of ACCs is frequently assumed by governments and donors to be linear but, in reality, it is sporadic, erratic and vulnerable to disruption by the volatility of government support and by fluctuating donor enthusiasm and fatigue. Building an effective, 'successful' ACC requires organizational maturity based on consistent, sustained organizational development. It is precisely these characteristics which are missing from the lifecycle experience of ACCs in Africa.

A central problem is the measurement of ACC performance - in particular the lack of appropriate measurement tools and the widespread employment of inappropriate, unhelpful, unrealistic and even counter-productive measures of performance. This creates a further difficulty in differentiating between achievable and non-achievable organizational performance and compounds the problem of distinguishing between factors which are within the ACC's control and those that are not. Donors do not actually know if their funding has any impact on corruption because they do not measure it. When they do measure, they often choose inappropriate measures for the wrong reasons - the Uganda Leadership Code is an extreme example of the adverse consequences for the ACC's capacity of choosing the wrong measure of ACC performance.

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Funding problems

We suggest that the widespread lack of 'success' of ACCs is intimately connected to how they are funded by donors and governments and what donors and governments expect of them. These expectations are not grounded in political or financial reality, nor are they approached through a clear management development strategy and nor are they informed by a clear understanding of the scale and complexity of corruption in the particular country.

In short, we argue that ACCs will never achieve 'success' until they are consistently funded at the right times, for the appropriately specified tasks, and at levels commensurate with a realistic level of performance.

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Report content

Parts I and II of the report introduces the problems and gives and overview of findings.

In Part III, we specify what we looked for as characteristic of a 'successful' ACC in terms of organizational development, relationships with donors and governments and what roles it performs within the wider governance context.

Part IV of the Report describes what we found in practice and this helped specify the size of the gap between what ought to happen and what actually is the case. The realities include seriously deficient governance frameworks and hostile governmental contexts with weak accountability, scrutiny and monitoring arrangements. In short, the anti-corruption architecture is generally ad hoc, poorly planned and inadequately executed. All ACCs have an uncomfortable relationship with their governments.

Donors' relations with ACCs are similarly difficult with ACCs often being donor led. ACCs will accept what donors are willing to make available and donors do so in terms of their own priorities and plans. One common consequence is that funding goes to front-line activities but the back-room organizational infrastructure is neglected.

ACCs remain organizationally immature and lacking in the key features of successful organizations - the use of business planning, functioning financial and management information systems, effective decision-making processes integrated with resource allocation and realistic performance indicators. Some features exist to an extent in some ACCs but the overall picture is one of under-development.

Part V of the Report focuses on how assessing the success of ACCs has been made more problematic by the choice and application of inappropriate and inaccurate performance measurement criteria. Overall, we argue that 'failure' is preordained by: the imposition of unrealistic objectives, limiting necessary resources, inadequate support for sustainable organizational development, inability to discriminate between intrinsic and extrinsic factors affecting performance and lack of appreciation of the strength and impact of political pressure on the ACC.

We identify a widespread failure to reconcile the scale and scope of the corruption problem with the resources and capabilities of the ACC and the specific political context of each country. Instead, the

Hong Kong ICAC model has been 'carpet-bombed' on the entire continent. Attempts to replicate the Hong Kong success have been made regardless of prevailing political, social and economic conditions, and the resources available to an ACC. All African ACCs subsist in conditions far less propitious and with much scarcer resources and capabilities than the ACC prototype. In effect, African ACCs have been consigned to a form of existence that not only constrains, but almost guarantees their inability to attain achievable levels of success.

The emphasis here is on 'achievable levels of success' rather than the unachievable and unrealistic. Too often, governments and donors expect ACCs with inadequate resources, unsophisticated investigative capabilities and operating within an undeveloped institutional infrastructure to pursue high-level systematic corruption when, even in the most developed societies, such pursuits are normally ineffective and unsuccessful. Catching the 'big fish' always seems attractive but the negative impact on the ACC's public credibility and capacity of successive failed fishing expeditions cannot be under-estimated.

Any assessment of an ACC's success, we argue, is a comparative and relative process relating activities undertaken and achievements attained within the scale and scope of corruption and an evaluation of context. Essentially, evaluating performance achieved in relation to available resources, level of capability employed and degree of difficulty in the operating environment. The aim should be to seek an optimal level of performance based on country specific realism rather than attempt to replicate the success of the Hong Kong ICAC achieved in a very different environment.

Part V concludes that none of the ACCs studied here have achieved 'success' in the broad sense of a discernible or measurable impact on levels of corruption although there is modest evidence of some 'activity' or 'output' success. There is therefore no continental role model of 'success' against which the other countries can be measured but this study has identified those environmental and contextual factors which are the least conducive to 'success'.

ACC success in Africa is likely to be comparative, relative, partial and perspective-dependent. In one sense, success is in the eye of the beholder.

Overall, there is a significant mismatch between the nature and scale of the corruption problem and the capacities and resources of ACCs. We conclude, in Part VI, by suggesting that:

1. The roles of ACCs should be re-examined. The justification for continuing to investigate low-level, petty corruption is not clear and the ability of any ACC to tackle contemporary, very high level political corruption is also in question. Similarly the role in community education on corruption needs greater justification.
   
2. A practitioner debate should begin on determining what should be the core function of an ACC and how that function might link to wider reform objectives. By way of illustration we give examples of ACCs working as corruption prevention organizations and as local governance investigators. We also note what we would expect from an ACC that chooses to focus only on high-level cases.

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Recommendations

'Success' has to be achievable and sufficient rather than complete. Our specific findings and recommendations are:

1. Governments and donors must agree on what the best role of the ACC is - focusing on what they are good at and what they have the resources to achieve.
   
2. When ACCs lack competency and capacity to perform particular roles, these should be divested or transferred to more suitable agencies.
   
3. Donors must identify and apply appropriate performance indicators in order to measure ACC operational performance and organizational success.
   
4. ACCs require sustained, structured organizational development.
   
5. ACCs should have a single strategic plan that is suitable, politically acceptable and feasible with appropriate and realistic performance measurement. Governments and donors should fund the plan for a specified period but government funding must be core and guaranteed.
   
6. Governments and donors must assess the optimal level of organizational performance achievable in the ACC's operating environment.
   
7. Governments and ACCs should agree 'SMART' objectives and relevant KPIs that are annually reviewed by a third party (e.g. the legislature) and revised accordingly.

But whichever roles ACCs undertake, the need to measure their performance remains. Unless and until the issues discussed in this Report are addressed, we see no realistic expectation of 'success' for ACCs or, indeed, developing the means to measure it.