Transparency International: a Doubting Thomas speaks :: FrontPageAfricaonline.com - All Things Africa 2
Written by JM Cassell, monjue@qualrs.com, Contributing Writer
Wednesday, 31 July 2013 05:10
Perhaps, it’s the Doubting Thomas within me, but when it comes to opinion polls and surveys, I
am a bit gun- shy or downright apprehensive about the results. There’s precedence, lots of it,
that helps frame my doubts and suspicion. In the United States, we all watched in amazement
how the once heralded Rasmussen poll took an integrity bashing by predicting that Mitt Romney
would trounce Barack Obama in a landslide , well, we all know the outcome of that election; it
wasn’t even close.
The state of California was to have its first black governor Tom Bradley, thanks to polls that
anointed him the winner days before the elections. Bradley got a rude awakening when the
actual results from the polling stations began to stream in. He was trounced by his opponent
George Deukjemejian, a defeat that coined a unique political theory called the Bradley Effect,
wherein white voters would deceive the pollsters that they will vote for a black candidate but on
the day of voting they vote for the candidate of their race. Needless to say, the history of opinion
polls and surveys is littered with data that turned out to be unreliable and unrepresentative. My
doubts and suspicion becomes even reinforced when the poll or survey is done in a developing
country like Liberia with all its challenges and high illiteracy rate.
That’s why the recent Transparency International Corruption Barometer that gives Liberia the
unenviable position of being the World’s 2nd Most Corrupt Nation has very little ,or no, resonance with me and I’m not alone, Western Academics and scholars, members of civil
society organizations and government representatives of several emerging nations have
vented their frustration over this shoddy, non-scientific polling . According to TI, the Barometer
examines people’s direct experiences with bribery and their perceptions of corruption in the
main institutions of their countries, based on interviews with 114,270 people in 107 countries
One of the most virulent criticism of the TI’s Perception Index and Corruption Barometer comes
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Transparency International: a Doubting Thomas speaks :: FrontPageAfricaonline.com - All Things Africa 2
Written by JM Cassell, monjue@qualrs.com, Contributing Writer
Wednesday, 31 July 2013 05:10
from a man who was once the head of Transparency Brazil, an off-shoot of Transparency
International in Brazil. Claudio Weber Abramo removed his chapter from under the TI umbrella
because he believed the methodology and indices were misleading . Here’s a quote from the
frustrated Abramo:
“Every time these indices are announced, they are presented in the press as indices “of
corruption”. More often than not, the “perceptions” part is forgotten. This leads most lay persons
to take such indices as reflecting actual levels of corruption affecting countries – even if, as
pointed out by many authors, the meaning of “actual level of corruption” is not at all clear.
Taking perceptions as indications of actual phenomena by default can become a habit.
Abramo, being from a developing nation, understands how the TI Report ’s observation can be
manipulated for political gains, especially in fragile developing countries, but he’s not alone.
Academics Paul Heywood of the U.K.’s University of Nottingham and Staffan Andersson of
Vaxjo University did a seminal paper on TI titled`The Politics of Perception: Use and Abuse of
Transparency International’s Approach to Measuring Corruption . Both scholars posited the
benefits of bringing corruption to the fore as TI has done, but they also agreed with the global
voices against the TI’s methodologies and warned of what they termed a “corruption Trap” wherein nations with very little resources to combat corruption will find themselves at the mercy
of development partners withholding funding until reforms are made.
This is an interesting paradox, a Catch -22 of sorts; not only will these nations need the
development funds to make the necessary transparency reforms but the Barometer and index
do not give any indication of how a country is developing or reforming institutions to fight graft
and corruption. In Liberia, the government has designed two institutions of horizontal
accountability (Guillermo O’Donnell) , the Liberian Anti-Corruption Commission (LACC)and the
General Auditing Commission (GAC), both institutions of monitoring and control that will help
deter, detect and punish the abuse of power as it relates to accumulating wealth unjustly.
Those institutions are seeking even more powers of autonomy from the legislature and in the
case of the LACC, more powers of prosecution. Currently, the LACC depends on the Ministry
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Transparency International: a Doubting Thomas speaks :: FrontPageAfricaonline.com - All Things Africa 2
Written by JM Cassell, monjue@qualrs.com, Contributing Writer
Wednesday, 31 July 2013 05:10
Of Justice for prosecution, and if the MOJ doesn’t prosecute within 3 months, the agency can
pursue prosecution. Why not clothe the LACC with full prosecutorial authority and cut out the
middle man? This is exactly what the LACC is pursuing through the legislature as this article
goes to Press.
Additionally, Anti-corruption agencies in these developing and fragile democracies are also up
in arms against these Perception indexes and Corruption Barometers, not only because of their
inaccuracy, but that they may be used as political fodder by the political opposition to advance
an agenda that undermines the objectives of these agencies.
For instance, In Liberia the TI Report is being twisted, re-interpreted and sold to the public by
the media and opposition politicians as a verdict on the Sirleaf government, and that is exactly
the point made by the TI critics, including Abramo, and a host of western scholars; the
opposition see a low TI score as a political gift, it doesn’t matter what reforms are being made, the current Liberian government has put in place the building blocks of a twin, aggressive,
anti-corruption mechanism via the LACC and GAC., but those reforms get lost in a sensational
media feeding frenzy that discounts reforms and highlights the incidence of government
corruption that are actually few and far between.
Any student of Liberian history knows that corruption has been rife in Liberian society and
government for over a hundred plus years, and is embedded in the societal DNA , grafted onto
the soul of the country.
We are from a “DASH” culture, unlike the West where tips are only commonplace in the service
industry, in Liberia tips or dash as it’s locally called, permeates all sectors of Liberian society,
including the public sector. Dash turns into bribery and then graft within the confines of
government agencies.. It is not a phenomena created by Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf. It is a cultural
phenomenon that preceded her birth; previous presidents of Liberia tried various measures to
stem the tide, but these were merely half-baked, Band-Aids solutions.
From President Tubman personally signing off on any government invoice that amounted to
$200 or over, to Samuel K. Doe’s sanctioning of a government official being publicly flogged for
corruption. President Tolbert came up with the idea of a Corruption Bureau to stem the tide of
corruption in government, but the bureau became a laughingstock; it virtually had no powers of
investigation or prosecution. Missing from the equation in those three administrations were
institutions that would deter, detect and investigate theft of government resources, as well as
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Transparency International: a Doubting Thomas speaks :: FrontPageAfricaonline.com - All Things Africa 2
Written by JM Cassell, monjue@qualrs.com, Contributing Writer
Wednesday, 31 July 2013 05:10
bribery. There were no aggressive accountability mechanisms in place that would hold corrupt
bureaucrats in check, until now, thanks to the GAC and LACC.
Now, let’s localize the methodology used for Liberia Corruption Perception Index (CPI) and
Corruption Barometer. How was the sampling done, did it meet the universal criteria of political
independence set by TI? Contrary to the impression given by the Liberian media, Transparency
International doesn’t set foot in a country to do their surveys, that responsibility is passed over
to TI’s civil society partners.
In Liberia, TI give a list of questions to a Liberian civil society group to do these polls and the
qualitative burden of the survey rested on the shoulders of the Liberian group. Their duty was
to do a representative sample of the Liberian population, I assume, that meant sampling
Liberians in all 15 counties, not only in Monrovia.
Did the pollsters ever leave Monrovia to do a country-wide survey? Well, it’s anybody’s guess.
I’ve got a gut feeling that they didn’t, again, maybe it’s just the Doubting Thomas in me, but
knowing Liberians, whenever they are Monrovia based, they are MONROVIA-BASED in every
sense of the word, not unlike a Monrovia based legislator who might find all the excuses to
avoid going to the outpost he represents in far-flung rural Liberia.
A key criteria of these pollsters is political independence; One cannot enter the theater of civil
society polling with a built-in bias or link to any political party or political group, because that
compromises independence and by extension contaminate the sampling with a political bias.
I have communicated with members of Liberian civil society and NGOs, be it through the social
media, chat-rooms and in person, although they may not say it, they all have political
sympathies, and those sympathies, more often than not , morph into political biases.. It goes
without saying that within a democracy, every citizen has a right to political alliance, but when
you claim to be a civil society organization and yet want to be active politically, then you are in
essence a political activist and not a member of the civic community or civil society. The two
don’t intertwine. You are either one or the other.
The news media in several countries posting low on TI’s corruption barometer did a pretty good
job at taking TI to task; they knew what was at stake. The prospects of investors shying away
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Transparency International: a Doubting Thomas speaks :: FrontPageAfricaonline.com - All Things Africa 2
Written by JM Cassell, monjue@qualrs.com, Contributing Writer
Wednesday, 31 July 2013 05:10
from their countries, and the perception of their nation being universally lampooned as a corrupt
cesspool, allowed them to do further scrutiny on the reports; theirs was a show of patriotism
and nationalism, going beyond the numbers, lifting the hood and highlighting the flaws.
But not the Liberian media. As a one-time active journalist, I understand the capacity issues in
the Liberian media , and in some cases the conflict between profit and journalistic integrity. It is
not that the media is anti-government, but an attention grabbing, sensational newspaper
headline that indicts the Liberian government will sell more papers then one that is dull,
disengaging, but factual; add in the haste to meet deadlines the media may sacrifice the finer
points concerning corruption to the demands of generalization.
Corruption is a symptom of a deeper social problem in Liberia and is not the major cause of
underdevelopment and poverty; we have had three changes in leadership with corruption given
as the reason for those changes, but the cancer is still metastasizing. This is a societal issue
that requires a root cause diagnostics that no Corruption Barometer with its glossy,
non-scientific polling or survey can address, it can only, according to this Doubting Thomas,
tell us of the symptoms.
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