KR#6: Recurring fires

New investigations and analysis from ZAM and our network.

In this edition of the Kleptocracy Report:

• Our editorial on hardy patronage systems that survive even when power changes hands.
• ZAM statement on the torture of Agather Atuhaire and Boniface Mwangi in Tanzania, enabled by Dutch-trained immigration structures.
• Legal Rebels– NAIRE’s transnational investigation on lawyers fighting kleptocracy. All five country investigations are out now.
• Delali Adogla-Bessa on recurring fires in Ghana.
• Estacio Valoi’s journalistic victory: the tree-smuggling management of the Quirimbas National Park in Mozambique has been fired after his investigations.
• Stories from our network and our recommendations for May.

Patronage, power, politics

Editorial from the ZAM investigations desk

In kleptocratic regimes, power can sometimes change hands, but the underlying logic of political patronage tends to keep producing the same results.

In this edition’s featured op-ed, Delali Adogla-Bessa warns that the newly elected “government for change” in Ghana may be going down the same path that saw previous governments angrily booted out by voters. He attributes this to persisting nepotism in state appointments. Once again, he writes, “inexperienced individuals are elevated because of partisan ties, while others are sidelined to head redundant institutions. Competence and the willingness to do right by the country take a backseat. The ‘jobs for the boys’ culture is alive and well.”

This is a familiar complaint to investigative journalists in Africa. Over and over again, opposition parties that had previously attacked sitting governments for corruption, made very little difference once they finally won elections and assumed state power.

“Corrupt systems cannot change quickly simply because a new government has taken power. The elites (…) remain influential under different administrations. Elections do not dismantle these entrenched networks — they merely shift the players in power while leaving the old structures intact,” says anti-corruption fighter Michael Kaiyatsa in Josephine Chinele’s recent article on the fight for the rule of law against a corrupt judiciary in Malawi.

Illustration by Diana Ejaita for ZAM

“Our turn to eat”

Most African states are marked by a deeply ingrained patronage system. This is partly a post-colonial legacy; local administrators once pleased their white bosses by selling out their own people and resources. After independence, these patronage systems were adopted by new political elites who employed the same tools to secure power and money for themselves, their friends and families, and their political organisations.

Leaders who espouse radical anti-colonial views (like formerly socialist liberation movements like ZANU-PF in Zimbabwe, or Burkina Faso’s vehemently anti-French (but pro-Russian) Captain Ibrahim Traoré) don’t seem to make much of a difference. It’s new people whose turn it is to rule, (or “eat” as per the saying that became the title of Michela Wrong’s book about a new political class in Kenya), and the new people operate the system in the same way as their previous enemies. They bring in their vassals to replace the vassals of the old regime, again without much regard for competence or the public interest.

These systems of patronage, as Nigerian head of academy of science Oyewale Tomori once put it in an interview with ZAM, run on favour. “Job competence is at present not part of the criteria for those looking for a position in politics. It is ‘who you know’. To succeed, you need a ‘Godfather’ and when you are successful you, too, become a ‘Godfather’. Your first concern on the job, even if you were a good candidate, is to repay favour,” he said.

Guantanamo

In numerous investigations, the NAIRE network has documented how the system spits out competent and dedicated public servants. In Malawi, for example, officials who were serious about stocking medical clinics and “refusing to play ball” were relegated to offices called “Guantanamo” where their principals would not assign them anything to do.

Why decades of anti-corruption interventions by institutions like the IMF and World Bank have failed to make a dent in these systems is a question many researchers grapple with. “Because the leaders don’t heed advice,” is Delali Adogla-Bessa’s take, and there is truth in that: why take advice that will have bad consequences for you and yours?

However, an even deeper truth is that patronage also breeds reliance on patronage; that is, a feeling among society — and for many people, a simple reality — that the only way to improve your life is through access to the same system. As long as the neglect of roads means that crops rot in the fields and inefficient public works cause plywood markets to burn down almost yearly, families will strive for at least one son or daughter to land a state job so that they can bring in stability and food.

The political parties and politicians that come into power sustain themselves by dispensing patronage — in the form of contacts or appointments — in exchange for party funds and electoral support. This happens at every level, from local government, to regional party bosses, to presidencies. As long as political leaders are assessed on their capacity to collect votes and secure resources for their party (or their patrons), rather than on their work for the public good, real development will remain a mirage. And the multi-billion-dollar anti-corruption sector, with its technocratic interventions, will find that the reality of patronage will keep beating it down.

Sell Outs

How to change the patronage systems is therefore the big question. It’s why we are looking forward to NAIRE’s upcoming transnational project, “Sell Outs”, which investigates the political elites who barter their countries’ natural resources for a life of abundant privilege for themselves. So far, findings in several countries point to a fight being waged between those who “sell out” and the communities — and even some officials — who try to do the right thing for the regions where the riches come from, just like in Quirimbas Park (see the story by Estacio Valoi below.) In the end, it might be these actions, if supported and sustained, that can show a way to dismantle kleptocracy and move toward better governance in Africa.

Torture of journalist and activist enabled by Dutch-trained immigration structures

Last week, NAIRE’s Ugandan member Agather Atuhaire, together with activist Boniface Mwangi from Kenya, was abducted and tortured by a special police squad in Tanzania. The two had travelled to Tanzania as part of an East African group intending to observe the political trial against opposition leader Tundu Lissu. But instead of being allowed to do so, immigration officials handed them over to the police squad, which abducted them to a secret location and subjected them to four days of beatings, sexual assault, and other torture techniques, before abandoning them in deserted border areas.

Agather Atuhaire

ZAM, which is based in Amsterdam, was especially shocked to learn that the Tanzanian immigration structures (who had earlier deported other members of the observers’ group) appeared collude with the torturers. The same Tanzanian immigration service has been, and continues to be, a beneficiary of a Dutch government training and capacity building project called Hostmanship, which is managed by the Netherland’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs ‘Return and Departure’ arm. The project aims to ensure that immigration services in countries successfully restrict their citizens from leaving for Europe illegally. In this case, the Tanzanian immigration authorities used their newly built-up capacity to hand visitors to Tanzania over to torturers.

ZAM has written to the Dutch parliamentary commission on Foreign Affairs with a request to investigate the incident. Can the Dutch government really pretend that it is building capacity for good governance in Tanzania when its funding is used for activities that enable torture? Read ZAM’s press release here.

Legal rebels

While law firms elsewhere often crumble and fold under intimidation by the powerful — or are complicit in kleptocracy and other evils — legal rebels in five African countries routinely risk imprisonment and death threats in their fight for justice. In ZAM’s new transnational investigation, Legal Rebels, Josephine Chinele, Emmanuel Mutaizibwa, Elizabeth BanyiTabi, Theophilus Abbah, Seth Bokpe and Edmund Boateng portray those who fight for the proper rule of law in Malawi, Uganda, Cameroon, Nigeria, and Ghana — and who often even cross the limits of what is deemed ‘acceptable’ behaviour for a lawyer in doing so. “They simply leave us no other option.” All five stories are out now on ZAM.

Recurring fires

President John Mahama is promising Ghanaians a “reset” after years in the political wilderness but is using the same methods as his predecessors. Like the Kantamanto Market keeps succumbing to fires, Ghana’s government remains plagued by the same ills, writes Delali Adogla-Bessa, warning that the “jobs for the boys culture is still alive and well.” As long as we build with plywood and ignore fire brigade warnings, “feel free to bet your house on the Kantamanto market being razed again.” Read the article on ZAM.

Photo by Nipah Dennis / AFP via Getty Images

Into the woods

Estacio Valoi’s exposures of timber logging and smuggling in the Quirimbas National Park in Cabo Delgado, Mozambique, are making waves. First, sources in the park reported that “the management was running around in a panic” after ZAM published Valoi’s investigation. Six months later, after a new government was elected in Mozambique, Valoi was asked to publish an open letter by 54 park employees asking new president Daniel Chapo to stop the plunder. And now we learn from Valoi’s reports in Mozambique (here and here) that high-level officials have been fired, and efforts by remaining corrupt kingpins to have the timber smugglers go underground — by reassigning them to new, different but crucial stations along smuggling routes — have come to nought after new management stopped the plans.

Whether the destruction of the forest has really been halted or whether new managers will try to set up their own exploitative networks remains to be seen. “We must make sure these old ones are not replaced by other thieves,” says Valoi, who intends to keep a close eye on the forest which is so crucial to the environment in Cabo Delgado.

Photo of logging in Quirimbas Park by Estacio Valoi

News from the network

• What the Tanzanian regime wanted was silence. What they got instead was defiance louder, bolder, and more unshakable than before. “They helped me overcome my worst fear. Now they’ve got nothing on me,” Agather Atuhaire tells Hanifa Adan in this interview for the Daily Nation, adding that she wants to ““hold those who did this accountable”, not just for herself but “for the countless Tanzanians who suffer without a platform.”
• Africa Uncensored has two new stories this month. Read about how global demand and lax laws fuel illicit gold flowsfrom Africa, and the insider deals and offshore companies behind Kenya’s high energy costs.
• ZAM investigations consultant and corruption researcher Devi Pillay wrote about the origins of the Commission of Inquiry into State Capture in South Africa, and how a captured state came to initiate a public inquiry into its own deeply embedded corruption. Read it on the Global Integrity Anti-Corruption Evidence blog.
• A new investigation by the OCCRPinto Fatima Bio, the wife of Sierra Leone’s president Julius Maada Bio, and how she and her close relatives have acquired real estate worth at least $2.1 million in Gamba — with funds of unexplained origin.
• Shuimo Trust Dohyee’s piece in Africa is a Countryon Cameroon’s kleptocrat-in-chief, President Paul Biya, is an excellent, deep look at the regime of the oldest leader in the world. Also in Africa is a Country, Alexandra Gerasimcikova and Paul Okumu wrote about the EU’s “Global Gateway” plan and how it persuades countries in the Global South to take up loans for projects that they do not need, for supposed benefits that they will not have, allowing further exploitation by European interests.
• Our partner PIJ Malawi won multiple awards at this year’s Media Institute of Southern Africa (MISA) Malawi Chapter media awards, including best online media house and best investigative journalists. NAIRE members Josephine Chinele and Gregory Gondwe won individuals awards for their work over this year.
• Also from PIJ Malawi: our colleagues are eagerly following the UK bribery trial against Malawi-born businessperson Zuneth Sattar. As our colleagues in Cameroon have recently found, foreign trials can be welcome sources of information for African journalists. The the charges against Sattar implicate a previous Vice President, a State House Chief of Staff, a former Inspector General of Police; a former Anti-Corruption Bureau Director General, and a former Malawi Defence Force official, among others.

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