By Abu Bakar Jalloh
In 2019, Sierra Leone improved its scores in many corruption indexes, including the TI Corruption Perception Index (CPI) and the U.S Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC) corruption control scorecard.
For example, Sierra Leone’s rankings improved in the CPI from 129 in 2018 to 119 in 2019, out of 180 countries, while the MCC’s corruption control scorecard shows that the country increased its scores from 49 percent in 2018 to 79 percent in 2019.
Many people argue that the institutional improvement is largely due to recent reforms at the Anti-Corruption Commission (ACC), judiciary, civil society and media. President Julius Maada Bio, whose campaign promises included rooting out corruption, appointed Mr. Francis Ben Kaifala Esq as the new ACC Commissioner as soon as he took office after winning the 2018 presidential elections.
“We have also been able to launch a special court, a special division of the high court that tries corruption issues; a lot more convictions have been recorded, the percentage is extremely high, over 95 percent conviction rate, we have been able to recover over $2 million of cash, we have been able to recover properties that have been returned to the state,” Mr. Kaifala told Politico at the ACC’s headquarters in Freetown.
ACC’s new anti-corruption strategy is what the Commissioner called “redirection of focus” or in economic terms making the cost of engaging in corruption extremely higher than the benefits.
Therefore, anti-corruption reforms over the past two years have focused on increasing the amount of fines and the time people spend in prison for engaging in corruption.
Another public institution that says it contributed to Sierra Leone’s improvement in the corruption indexes is the Right to Access Information Commission (RAIC).
“When we took over about two years ago only 48 cases of requests to access information had been registered since the establishment of the Commission in 2014 and by 2020 we have about 112 cases,” said Dr. Ibrahim Seaga Shaw, the Chairman or Information Commissioner at RAIC. Dr. Shaw said in one case a civil society or non-state actor was refused to access information for a very long time at the Local Council in Kenema District. He said through the intervention of RAIC, the information was provided by the Council.
However, many people argue that corruption indexes such as the TI CPI are in many context misleading. For example, companies from the cleanest or corruption-free countries (Denmark, New Zealand, Finland, Singapore and Sweden) in the TI CPI are found to be among major violators of international anti-corruption laws, according to the U.S. Foreign Corruption Practice Act (FCPA).
The Commissions of Inquiry (COI) meant to probe into the affairs and alleged corruption of the former government was inaugurated on January 29, 2019 at the compound of the former Special Court for war crimes located in the west end of Freetown. Three separate Commissions, headed by judges from Nigeria, Ghana and Sierra Leone, are still hearing testimonies from witnesses who include former officials.
Some anti-corruption experts argue that “top down” concepts of national anti-corruption reforms built around the ACC, improved administrative process, independent judiciary, transparency, media and civil society organizations could be ineffective in Sierra Leone.
Top-down reforms
Many people say that “top down” reforms copied from market democracies such as United States and United Kingdom are ineffective primarily because Sierra Leone’s state institutions are always captured by some political and economic elites.
According to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission Report published in 2004, state institutions such as the judiciary used to protect private interest instead of the public interest for far too long, contributing greatly to the outbreak of the brutal civil war that lasted from 1991–2002, killing over 70,000 people and displacing about half of the country’s population.
However, many law enforcement officials still complain that corrupt government officials have more capacity to protect the interest of their clients than those before the war.
“There is protectionism for certain interest when it comes to ability to access contracts, the ability to evade taxes and other benefits,” said Kaifala.
Many people suggest that political and economic elites still find it easy to have the judiciary, civil society and media organizations to give them illicit advantages to win votes, jobs, contracts, subsidies, tax exemptions, etc in a country where strong majority of the population desperately look for opportunities to shed away poverty. Others imply that people with enormous wealth and power are financing what they call “media wars.”
Mr. Mohamed Asmieu Bah, the Secretary General of the Sierra Leone Association of Journalists (SLAJ), said: “if a newspaper is investigating corruption, for example, involving particular multinational company or top government official, what that company or government official does is to go also and hire or recruit another media house to fight that media war.” In other words, almost each media report on corruption involving top government official or a multinational company is contradicted or dismissed by other news organizations as false, libelous, political, tribal or regional.
Those who argue that Sierra Leone is a captured state suggest that official impunity is widespread. They imply that state institutions such as the ACC and RAIC are very weak and lack the necessary resources to deal with official impunity corruption. Some civil society and media organizations always complain that government is neither accountable nor transparent. For many years now, they have been calling for the reform of the Public Order Act of 1965 to repeal the Criminal Libel Law which they say government officials use to harass, intimidate, incarcerate, or keep them silenced.
To highlight the high level of official impunity, Abudul M. Fatoma, Chief Executive at Campaign for Human Rights and Development International (CHRDI), said: “Our organization publishes a report asking members of parliament to account for money that was meant for their constituencies and for them to explain how they go about using that money. They grew offended with such questions. They said it was libelous and treasonable and there was a parliamentary motion passed on me to be tried in this country for challenging Parliament.”
Journalists always say they are most of the time barred from accessing information at public institutions such as Ministries, Departments, Agencies, Commissions and Enterprises.
“I am a television journalist and I am working on a story right now that requires talking to a certain individual. I have called that individual for the past four days, a senior government official, he’s not been answering my calls. I’ve sent him SMS, he’s not even responding to my messages,” said Mr. Bah, who presents television programs at the Sierra Leone Broadcasting Corporation (SLBC).
Law enforcement institutions including ACC and RAIC largely blame lack of resources for their weaknesses to enforce the laws across-the-board. Mr. Kaifala said the ACC had not been able to invest in cars, computers and software or research, technology and accurate data collection.
“The most difficult challenge we face right now is resources. We are extremely underfunded. We are extremely under sourced. We do not have capacity. We cannot employ. We cannot promote. We cannot expand,” the ACC Commissioner lamented.
RAIC also said that they do not have the resources to higher staff for even their office in Freetown.
“We have one serious challenge that is undermining our ability to implement the laws. It starts with under capacity. We are under staffed. When we took over, we realized that there were a lot of vacancies to be filled. So we are really struggling. We have a lot to do. We have a huge mandate. This is a national commission,” Dr. Shaw said.
Bottom-up reforms
Some human rights experts argue that citizens’ fundamental rights, their rights to life and liberty, freedom of opinion and expression, and rights to work, education, access to information, and to participate in decisions affecting their lives are largely violated.
“For now we have a generation who have been denied access to education. Immediately after our civil war, children who dropped out of primary school and high school were only empowered with skills training. They were not empowered with higher education. That’s why you see low level of education within young people at the age of 33, 35 and 37. They have all lots of challenges to really differentiate what are their rights and what are their responsibilities and how they can claim these rights,” Mr. Fatoma said.
Therefore, there are very few Sierra Leoneans who have the basic education to understand democracy and markets to defend their political and economic wellbeing against corruption and exploitation. Sierra Leone ranked 184 out of 189 countries in the United Nations Human Development Index (HDI) in 2018. The 7 million residents in this mineral exporting economy have a GNI per capita of only $500 in 2018, according to the World Bank.
Moreover, social opposition to corruption is as weak as public institutions, especially when the population is deeply divided along political, ethnic and regional lines.
“You see there are things that are emotionally charged, the tribe you speak, the region you come from, your village, your tribes men, the political party you support,” Mr. Kaifala said, while explaining the challenges he faces to persuade the general public to support the ACC.
Proponents of “bottom-up” reforms say they could not understand why the new amendment of the Anti-Corruption Act failed to make provision for the general public to have the right to access information relating to assets declared by top government officials. On the other hand, the ACC argue that given the fragile security of the country, Sierra Leone is not ready to make public the value of assets declared by politicians and their spouses.
“For example, now you come from a village, you do your asset declaration and the entire village know that you have $1 million sitting in your account. I’m telling you everybody who get sick and die there you have to bury them. If you don’t burry them, they would use that money to describe how wicked and cynical you are. It would make people driven out of their villages,” Mr. Kaifala reasoned.
The Anti-Corruption Act 2008 that states it is an offense for public officials to possess unexplained wealth conflicts with the Right to Access Information Act 2013.
“There are existing legislation that conflict with our laws, the Anti-Corruption Act 2008 makes it very difficult for public disclosure, except that particular law is amended. It is going to be posing problems for us, for our proactive disclosure, because the assets of public officials are supposed to be publicly disclosed,” Dr. Shaw added.
However, public disclosure of assets declared by top government officials might increase the cost of engaging in corruption not only in fines and convictions but also losing your public office in the democratic process and your business in the free market.
Abu Bakarr Jalloh is the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) at Sanusi Research & Consulting LLC
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