Improving government accountability in Africa

Vigorous steps are required to revitalize governance structures, reduce conflict and unite nations in Africa. There must be a deliberate focus toward personal responsibility and away from grievance politics. We must create accountable, strong, effective and representative systems that serve our diverse populations across the continent.

Unending internal conflicts in Africa are a political morals and values issue; they are founded on marginalisation of the public from decision-making processes, lack of transparency from those holding power, misinterpretation of government intentions by the governed, public disaffection and frustration with a leadership that consistently fails to fulfil its duties.

When we fail to build structures with enforceable rules of accountability, we unfortunately build permissive structures for grievance politics, vigilantism and the bigotry that goes with it. Legitimate areas of concern are not objectively investigated but cannibalised for the justification of starting costly armed conflicts and abuse of human rights.

Checks and balances must be central to government operations; these are vital for any governance system to be responsive to public needs. People must have a stake in how they are governed and how national resources are managed for national benefit; systems must provide clear legal pathways for accountability so the public can access and query actions of those in authority – past and present.

Where the law does not serve the people, the people start to serve as the law. But we have learned that vigilantism in response to ineffective formal and weak institutions can never serve as a genuine accountability and conflict resolution tool because it lacks legal authority, due process, and internal structural checks. If anything, it encourages extrajudicial acts by replacing impartial interventions with emotional or arbitrary reactions.

Where facts and government transparency are in short supply, as is often the case in most of Africa, emotions fill the gap and become the primary selling point; the zone is flooded with devastating misinformation, disinformation and outright lies and all channels that may lead to potential facts lose their appeal to an impatient, comfort seeking, not fact checking, audience.

The current South African public response to legitimate concerns of years of government mismanagement of immigration is a prime example where in response to law’s failure to serve the people, the people begin to serve as the law and a safe space for difficult conversation is denied and justice lost.

When an emotion-driven public serves as the law, chaos ensues and the risk to others and property escalate due to often illegal and disproportionate interventions.

People must not be routinely pushed into situations where they see justification in taking the law into their own hands. Risks increase because a riled public often struggles to maintain good regulation of their emotions and end up being the monsters they are fighting.

There needs to be both attitudinal and a structural shift to a culture of accountability through structural reforms that will enable institutional changes that enhance transparency. We must not only encourage public engagement but demand it; instead of citizens voluntarily surrendering power and decision-making to the leadership, they must lend it with conditions attached and lead in demanding open and regular feedback.

Attitudinal changes in public society must be developed through education and incentivisation of meaningful engagement in governance processes. The public needs to be clear about their roles and expectations for those in position of power and these expectations must be instituted replicated at all levels of government – from continent bodies to regional bodies and individual state level.

Governments need to be afraid of their citizens and not vice versa; citizens must ably hold people with power responsible for their decisions. This will be achieved via elected or selected representatives and civil society. We must have moral clarity and instil conditions where there are consequences when things go wrong, and lessons are learned from every mistake and outright bad practice uncovered and appropriate improvements made.

Improve access to data to enable nonpartisan reviews and robust questioning of significant public officials by elected representatives – the public needs up-to-date information on government spending, information about procurement and contract data, clear logs of government agendas including minutes and votes. It must be mandatory for leaders to give updates on various ongoing government projects – their risks and feasibility and clear feedback on goals set and progress being made.

We all know about the impact of slavery and colonialism in Africa, how it marginalised the Black person from deciding how he/ she should be governed, how it instilled dictatorship in the governance structures; this is a past that we remain aware of, but our progress depends on not living in that past but being inspired to instil progressive attitudes and institutions that promote transparency in the continent. For Africa to change, Africans need to change themselves and how they look at things. Identifying causes of our stagnation must not be followed by whingeing but problem-solving.