Author Archives: Marvellous Iheukwumere

About Marvellous Iheukwumere

Marvellous is a first-year student at Harvard Law School. She has worked at the intersection of sports, anticorruption, and corporate governance. She is interested in international legal affairs, mostly pertaining to Africa.

Fighting Police Corruption in Nigeria: An Agenda for Comprehensive Reform

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Nigeria has a serious problem with police corruption, at all levels. At the top, senior police officials embezzle staggering sums of public funds. To take just one example, in 2012, the former Inspector General of Police, Sunday Ehindero, faced trial for embezzling 16 million Naira (approximately US$44,422). Meanwhile, at the lower levels, rank-and-file police officers regularly extort money from the public, and crime victims must pay bribes before the police will handle their cases. As a 102-page report by Human Rights Watch documented, police extortion is so institutionalized that Nigerians are more likely to encounter police demanding bribes than enforcing the law. No wonder Nigeria’s police force was ranked as the worst of those included in the 2016 World Internal Security and Police Index, and that Transparency International’s Global Corruption Barometer survey found that a staggering 69% of Nigerian citizens think that most or all police officers are corrupt.

To combat such a deep-rooted and systemic problem, bold and comprehensive reforms are needed. What would an effective reform agenda look like? Here is an outline of the most important reforms that are needed, drawing on international best practices but also tailored to Nigeria’s particular circumstances: Continue reading →

Leveraging Blockchain to Combat Procurement Corruption

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Procurement corruption–including things like bid rigging, shadow vendors, and the steering of public contracts to politically connected firms—is an enormous worldwide problem, costing taxpayers up to $2 trillion annually. New technologies, though certainly no panacea, may offer new techniques for combating this sort of corruption. One such technology is blockchain.

Blockchain, most famous as the foundational technology for cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin, is a “distributed ledger technology” (DLT)—a tamper-proof record of activities that are time-stamped and verified by a distributed network of computers. DLT creates a trail of information which allows for the full traceability of every transaction and stores a chronological list of transactions in an encrypted ledger. Transactions are bundled into a secure and identifiable block and then added to a corresponding chain. The blockchain is maintained and verified by the distributed crowd, eliminating the need for hierarchy and any centralized authority or middleman. And while blockchain is best known for its role in making cryptocurrencies feasible, it also has a range of other applications, including anticorruption applications. For example, Tanzania has utilized the technology to weed out “ghost workers” from the public sector, ending the monthly outflow of 430 billion Tanzanian shillings (approximately US$195.4 million) in salaries to fake employees who exist only on paper. Nigeria’s customs service has also used blockchain technology to store information on financial transactions and share these transactions across multiple computer networks.

Blockchain technology could also be used to combat common forms of procurement corruption, particularly those that involve after-the-fact tampering with submitted bids and supporting documentation. Such a system would work as follows: Continue reading →

Incorporating Anticorruption Measures in the African Continental Free Trade Agreement (AfCFTA)

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On April 2, 2019, The Gambia became the 22nd country to ratify the African Continental Free Trade Agreement (AfCFTA), which was the minimum threshold to approve the deal among the 55-member states of the African Union (AUえーゆー). The AfCFTA aims to provide a single continental market for goods and services, as well as a customs union with free movement of capital and business travelers. Although the agreement will enter into force one week from tomorrow (on May 30, 2019), the negotiations for the Protocols and other important matters such as tariff schedules, rules of origin, and sector commitments are still being negotiated. However, once the treaty is fully in force, it is expected to cover a market of 1.2 billion people and combined gross domestic product of $2.5 trillion, which would make it the world’s largest free trade area since the creation of the World Trade Organization. This could be a game-changer for Africa. Indeed, the U.N. Economic Commission on Africa predicts that the AfCFTA could increase intra-African trade by as much as 52.3%, and that this percentage will double when tariff barriers are eliminated. The AfCFTA promises to provide substantial opportunities for industrialization, diversification, and high-skilled employment. And the AUえーゆー’s larger goal is to utilize the AfCFTA to create a single common African market.

Yet there are a number of challenges that could thwart the effectiveness of this new treaty in promoting free trade and economic development. Corruption is one of those challenges. International indexes indicate that Sub-Saharan Africa is perceived as the most corrupt region in the world, with North Africa not much better. The current version of the treaty, however, does not address corruption directly. It should. Continue reading →