Most Africans say war on corruption is failing

Dakar, Thursday. A majority of Africans believe their governments are not doing enough to curb corruption, according to a landmark survey across 34 countries published Wednesday, with police seen as the most unscrupulous institution.

Some 56 per cent said their countries were doing a poor job of fighting graft, while one in three had recently been forced to bribe a public official, according to a survey of more than 51,000 Africans by the Afrobarometer research project.

“The fight against corruption has had a very high profile in the last decade both with African leaders, and among regional and international organisations and donors,” the organisation said in a report released in the Senegalese capital Dakar.

“Afrobarometer data shows that these efforts have not been sufficient to curb corruption levels.”

Police attracted the highest ratings of corruption among public officials across the 34 countries, with 43 per cent saying that “most” or “all” were involved in corruption.

The figure was as high as 78 per cent in Nigeria and 69 per cent in Kenya and Sierra Leone -- but just 14 per cent in Algeria.

Government and tax officials also scored badly, while judges and heads of state fared best in the survey, carried out between October 2011 and June 2013.

Thirty per cent reported paying a bribe in the past year to obtain a service or avoid a problem, with the figure rising to 63 per cent in Sierra Leone, one of the world’s poorest countries after a brutal 11-year civil war that ended in 2002.

Morocco, Guinea and Kenya all fared badly while fewer people said they had paid bribes in Namibia, Mauritius, Cape Verde and Botswana.

The International Monetary Fund projects that sub-Saharan Africa will grow at 5.7 per cent in 2013, outpacing most regions and rivalling Asia’s boom markets.

But while strides have been made in reducing the numbers of Africans living on less $1.25 a day, more than a third of the world’s extreme poor still live in sub-Saharan Africa.

The Afrobarometer research project involves a number of independent African organisations and measures public attitudes on economic, political and social matters in sub-Saharan Africa. Its report, titled “Governments Falter in Fight to Curb Corruption: The people give most a failing grade”, also found that the poorest were punished the most by corruption.

Almost one in five people who had gone without food in the past year had paid a bribe to obtain medical treatment, compared with just over one in 10 among those who never went without food. (AFP)