Rubio: Corruption’s a Human Rights Problem
On the sidelines of a high-level workshop on international anti-corruption best practices, organised by the Civil Society Legislative Advocacy Centre (focal point of the local TI chapter in Nigeria, headed by Auwal Musa Ibrahim aka Rafsanjani) with support from the Ford Foundation and MacArthur Foundation, which took place in Abuja recently, Chair of Transparency International, Ms. Delia Ferreira Rubio, shared her views on corruption and other development issues, in an exclusive interview with Abimbola Akosile. Excerpts:
Can you tell us, who is Delia Ferriera Rubio, and why are you here in Nigeria?
I am from Argentina, I am a lawyer. And in October last year, I was elected Chair of Transparency International. Transparency International is a global organisation against corruption which has chapters in more than 100 countries and we have more than 20 individual members. This year, we are 25 years old and it is a great organisation and we have achieved lots of things in these 25 years.
In this first visit to Nigeria and Africa, what is your first impression about the people, about the environment?
Well, this is my first time here geographically in Africa, but I have been working with many of our chapters during our meetings and conferences in Berlin and in other parts of the world so I am familiar with the chapters that are working here in Africa and the work they are doing. The situation here in terms of corruption is not so different from the situation in my region Latin America; we have lots of countries that are performing very poorly in terms of corruption, and so the problems are common. The solutions may be similar and it is important to change to exchange experiences and learn from the experiences of other countries in the world, not just from the very transparent countries giving lessons to us but also collaborating among us with our common problems.
As the Chair of TI, can you tell us very briefly the differences between corruption perception and reality?
I suppose you are talking about our Index. The Index of perception in public sector corruption is an index of indexes, it’s not ran by Transparency International; all we do is to collect information from any sources which analyse governance, transparency questions in the countries and it is not an index to measure the quantity of corruption but how the public sector in one country is perceived by academics, specialists, experts and international organisations.
In that sense we then statistically produce an index from all these sources and that is what we produce each year as the index of perception of corruption. Some people say, okay, why don’t you measure the number of causes at the tribunals or courts for instance in order to know real cases of corruption or why don’t you measure convictions, which is even stronger; evidence-based decisions that convicted persons responsible for corruption.
The problem is that convictions or processes initiated in court doesn’t mean that the country is more or less corrupt. You can have lots of convictions because the country is very transparent and whenever a case appears, they manage to produce a conviction of those responsible. And you can have instances of lots of procedures open at the judiciary and at the courts and that is the consequence of a well-functioning system of anti-corruption. So, that is not really the fact; the fact that you have lots of convictions doesn’t mean you have lots of corruption. So we decided many years ago to resort to a proxy and the proxy is how the public sector is perceived in terms of corruption.
From the latest TI Corruption Perception Index ranking, around 69 per cent of the countries that were ranked scored below 50 marks out of 100. It paints a gloomy picture; does it give any room for improvement?
Yes, it gives room for improvement; without that I hope, I wouldn’t have been working 30 years in anti-corruption in a country which ranking is very low in the scale, which is my country Argentina. I think that a factor which is important is that corruption is a pervasive and endemic reality in many of our countries and that means we have a challenge to face and to tackle. You mentioned 69 per cent of the countries; this year we analysed 180 countries in the world. In order to be considered in the index the country has to be analysed at least by three international sources measuring governance and anti-corruption. So from these 180 countries, 69 per cent are under 50 marks. Our scale goes from 100 marks which means highly transparent to zero mark which means highly corrupt. And the importance of this 69 per cent of the countries below 50 marks is that they represent, they are the countries where more than 6 billion people are living. And that is really what struck me because it shows that corruption really is a human rights problem. It means that more than 6 billion people are exposed to corruption every day in their lives when they want a place in the school or a bed in the hospital or they want a subsidy, a social subsidy, from the state or they want the ID card and in order to get that they have to pay a bribe.
But not only that; in those countries we have also not just petty corruption produced by interactions with individuals not at a very high level of the decision-making process. These countries also have grand corruption and grand corruption means other forms of victimisation of the society in general. Because it means the public resources are going to private pockets, not only private pockets in the country but also travelling to havens, tax havens or money laundering havens...
Capital flight...
Yeah, and this means stolen assets from the people. So the money which is not in schools, in roads, in hospitals, in water, in sanitation is the money of the corruption. So in that sense again, corruption is a problem of human rights and ordinary lives of the people in our countries. They are really the victims and that is why they should be involved in the fight against corruption.
In the 2017 CP Index, Nigeria scored 27 marks and slid down 12 places... what is your take on this?
My personal opinion is that you have to look at the relation of the scores that the country has been getting through the years because that depends on the country’s activities. The ranking may be influenced by the position of the performance of other countries in the neighbourhood of the ranking. So you can go up or down depending on the quantity of countries in each of the CPI each year or the relative performance of that country. But in order to assess how a country is doing, now we can compare the scores one year after one year.
And many people have told me, okay, we have passed the laws, we have created the agencies, in fact we have lots of agencies here in Nigeria and it has not been reflected in the Index. Number one, the index has not an immediate reflection of this kind of things because it is a perception index. So in order to regain trust and regain confidence and reputation, you have to have the rules passed and the agencies approved or created but you have to have the time to show the world that they are implemented, that they are effective and that they have made a difference from before. So probably it takes more than just one year or more in order to have the change in the score of the country.
But nevertheless it is not enough to create rules or pass laws or to create agencies, or to appoint persons in certain responsibilities. What is important is, what is the impact of that in the corruption situation in the country?