Bureaucratic and Political Corruption in Africa: The Public Choice Perspective (review)

This is a thought-provoking book, which advances the debate about corruption in Africa. Its approach is interdisciplinary and wide-ranging. It expands Mbaku's earlier analyses of corruption, providing a thorough analysis that contrasts traditional and public-choice approaches to the phenomenon. Such comparison is a tall order. How well does he succeed?

Overall, Mbaku does extremely well. With regard to accessibility, much of chapter 1 is devoted to explaining the book's assertion that corruption in Africa "is a direct consequence of poorly designed institutional arrangements and distorted incentive structures" (p. 5). Mbaku sets out with admirable clarity his justification of the public-choice framework that African state institutions use for self-enrichment. Thus, the state is no longer an autonomous entity that has its own interests, but is an intervening variable used by self-interested individuals pursuing their own preferences. The rest of the book is divided into two parts: chapters 2 through 6 develop traditional approaches to corruption; chapters 7 through 10 analyze corruption within the public-choice perspective.

Chapter 2 distinguishes bureaucratic and political corruption. Chapter 3 illustrates types of corruption in case studies of Ghana, Nigeria, Congo (Zaire), and Cameroon; it also discusses traditional explanations of corruption, including state weakness, inefficient and incompetent bureaucracy, chronic poverty, and unequal distributions of wealth. In contrast to these explanations, chapter 7 provides the public-choice view that corruption emerges when self-interested public servants try to maximize their level of compensation. Basically, businesses maximize profits, consumers maximize utility, and politicians maximize political support or reelection (p. 133). However, the absence of constitutional methods for regime succession in Africa means that incumbent politicians tend to secure a monopoly on power and the allocation of resources (p. 133). Thus, state managers can use their monopoly on power in a selective manner to benefit themselves or specific groups at the expense of other members of society. Mbaku asserts that the performance of Africa in the postindependence period is dismal because most public policy has involved primarily income and wealth distribution, rather than wealth creation. This policy choice has exacerbated income inequalities, poverty, and the marginalization of the masses. He attributes this economic performance to bad rules, which regulate sociopolitical interactions and determine the incentive structure faced by market participants. Corruption is the outcome of these rules, which serve to extract rents from the private sector. Foreign entrepreneurs are not spared from state managers' rent-seeking behavior. The case of Cameroon illustrates his public choice argument quite well.

Chapters 4 and 7 analyze the consequences of corruption according to traditional and public-choice perspectives respectively. Traditional approaches provide mixed results. One approach views corruption as a stimulus to economic development. Another is that corruption encourages inefficiency and hence hinders the process of economic development. In contrast, the public-choice perspective unambiguously perceives corruption as rent-seeking behavior, which chokes the development process. Thus, anticorruption campaigns that rely on traditional approaches and reforms focusing on international perspectives will only provide short-term solutions, because they emphasize the manipulation of outcomes without affecting the rules of the game or the incentive structures (ch. 6). Following the public-choice perspective, Mbaku recommends the establishment of self-enforcing constitutional rules as an effective way to fight opportunistic or corrupt behavior (ch. 9). Thus, changing the rules of the game is preferable to any effort "trying to police the behavior of the participants in markets which are characterized by distorted incentive structures" (p. 139).

In chapter 8, Mbaku shows that postindependence African leaders manipulated institutional arrangements for several reasons. The most important one was that constitutional discourse in the preindependence period was a top-down process, without popular participation. Had the process involved extensive consultation of the people at each stage, the outcome would have reflected people's values, ideals, and interests. The failure to elicit popular participation in the making of constitutional...