Lessons of the Northern War on African corruption^*

* Comments by Fred Hendricks, Thandika Mkandawire, participants at the African Perspectives on Global Corruption conference (22–23 February 2017), and an insightful anonymous reviewer are gratefully acknowledged.

ABSTRACT

In the 1990s states, international non-governmental organisations, and capitalist enterprises launched a novel campaign against transnational corruption. This essay addresses how and when this campaign emerged, how corruption was framed as a product of African state failure and patrimonialism, and how radical changes in the global political economy, most notably East-South relationships, undermine our understanding of the actors and paths of transnational corruption.

KEYWORDS:

• Corruption
• African studies
• Transparency International
• patrimonialism

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

William G. Martin teaches at Binghamton University and writes widely on global inequalities in knowledge production, the political economy of southern Africa, and contemporary struggles against mass incarceration and mass policing.

Notes

* Comments by Fred Hendricks, Thandika Mkandawire, participants at the African Perspectives on Global Corruption conference (22–23 February 2017), and an insightful anonymous reviewer are gratefully acknowledged.

1 On the first day of meeting in 2017, the new Republican congress brazenly attempted to eviscerate the House Office on Congressional Ethics. Within another week, Trump and the Republican majority announced they were terminating the (Dodd-Frank) regulations preventing US corporations from secretly bribing foreign government and officials.

2 US laws have not been enforced of course; in the twenty years after the passage of the Act in 1977, there were less than ten investigations and far fewer settlements; in the new century cases grew to the still miserly number of ten a year (U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission 2017).

3 A case made by both scholars of international organisations, e.g. Reimann (2006), and by African scholar-activists, e.g. Shivji (2007).

4 In France the book received at best a paternalist welcome from the left (Mellino 2011, 62), while the Arabic version of Les Damnes, published shortly after the French version, omitted whole sections of Fanon’s denunciation of the leadership class of newly independent states as intermediaries for the North (Yaser Munif 2012). Across the Atlantic, the text remained unknown until adopted by militants during the explosion of black power in the United States in the late 1960s and 1970s, and much later, in Brazil and South America (Guimarães and Alfredo 2009).

5 As always there were exceptional cases, most notably (Amin 1974).

6 There remain alternative lines of analysis which cannot be pursued here; see for example (Mamdani 1996; Hountondji 1990, 2009; and the commentary by Connell 2011).