Corruption in defense spending is eroding African countries’ capacity to meet rising security challenges and undermining public trust in governments, according to a report released today by the NGO Transparency International.
Defense spending on the continent has been rising over the past few years, in response to the increased threat of Islamic militancy in North, West and the Horn of Africa. According to figures from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, defence budgets have risen by 91% in the last decade, reaching $40 billion in 2015. However, that growth has not been matched with a commensurate increase in governance and oversight mechanisms, creating a fertile ground for corruption, Transparency International says.
“Because [the defense industry] deals with national security, secrecy is seen as being a sort of acceptable norm. It doesn’t get the same level of scrutiny, and isn’t forced to get the same level of transparency that others are,” Leah Wawro, programme manager of Transparency International’s conflict and insecurity team, says.
The complexity and opacity of arms deals means that they are less well examined than, for example, natural resource or infrastructure contracts, according to Wawro, who says that the tight relationship between governments and arms companies worsens the governance environment.
“Given the close links between the arms trade and national security establishments, you often see exporting states acting on behalf of their national defense companies in export markets, and that can mean less oversight by the state.”
In many countries in Africa, defense budgets are not subject to scrutiny by lawmakers or civil society, even in places where corruption is known to be severe.
Corruption has a deleterious effect on security, leading to procurement decisions that do not meet the real needs of armed forces in the field, or meaning that materiel never arrives at where it is needed. In several countries, including Côte d’Ivoire, Cameroon, Sierra Leone and Uganda, salary scams including ‘ghost soldiers’ — troops who do not exist but are paid nonetheless — have taken money from the public purse. In Uganda alone, ghost soldiers have cost an estimated $324 million over the past two decades.
In 2011, Uganda paid $740 million for six Russian SU-30 fighter jets, which should have cost around $330 million, according to the NGO. The country’s legislature was not consulted on the purchase.
Last November, Nigeria’s former national security advisor, Sambo Dasuki, was arrested following accusations that he appropriated 32 billion naira ($160 million) from bogus arms deals, which were supposed to equip soldiers fighting Boko Haram in the north. Among the deals under investigation are $2 billion worth of orders for helicopters and munitions that were never delivered.
Nigeria has been fighting an insurgency by the extremist group Boko Haram for the past decade, with varying success. Soldiers and activists report that the well-funded Nigerian military has often been outgunned in the field, and that its troops are poorly equipped.
“Had the funds siphoned to these non performing companies been properly used for the purpose they were meant for, thousands of needless Nigerian deaths would have been avoided,” a spokesman for Nigeria’s president Muhammadu Buhari said at the time.
On January 15, Buhari, who successfully campaigned for the leadership on an anti-corruption ticket, announced that 38 former military officers and companies — including the former chiefs of defense and of the air force — would be investigated for procurement fraud relating to arms deals.
These investigations are a good start, Wawro says, but they are not a substitute for deeper reforms to governance and oversight mechanisms.
I think that we’re seeing some promising signs from Buhari… but I think what you need to see there is reform — making the budget transparent once and for all,” she says.
“Defense and security is considered the exception to allowing civil society to talk about it and having a healthy public debate… It needs to be treated as a more risky sector, and one that deserves more scrutiny than others, rather than less.”
