Political Elites and Anticorruption Campaigns as ＂Deep＂ Politics of Democracy A Comparative Study of Nigeria and South Africa

Olugbemiga Samuel Afolabi

《Taiwan Journal of Democracy》 15卷1期 (2019/07) Pp. 159-181

摘要

Studies of elite corruption and anticorruption have provided insight into their embeddedness in political and democratic processes. Since the return to democracy in 1999 in Nigeria, and independence in 1994 in South Africa, there has been growing interest in the relationship among corruption, anticorruption, and democracy. Despite these early advances of the study of elite corruption, the many ways that elite corruption and efforts against it have become part of the ＂hidden transcripts＂ of power and democracy in Africa remain unexamined. Using secondary data, this research examines corruption and the need for its reduction as a crucial ingredient in the politics of democracy in contemporary Africa. From a comparative perspective, the study focuses on the relationship between democracy and its antithesis, corruption, as one of mutual entanglement and co-constitutive aspects of politics in two African states: Nigeria in Anglophone West Africa and South Africa in Southern Africa. The entangled, yet antithetical relationship between corruption and democracy in these two countries means that for the political elite in Nigeria and South Africa, the quest for democracy calls for an embattlement against corruption through sustained rhetoric and practice of anticorruption politics. The essay explains how the interplay between corruption and anticorruption has become the deep realm of democratic politics in Africa.

關鍵字

Anticorruption ； deep politics ； elite corruption ； Nigeria ； political settlement ； South Africa

參考文獻

Daniel Jordan Smith, “Kinship and Corruption in Contemporary Nigeria,” Ethnos 66, no. 3 (2001): 344-364

Daniel J. Smith, A Culture of Corruption: Everyday Deception and Popular Discontent in Contemporary Nigeria (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007)

Russell Smith, “Chipping Away at Corruption: Can We Rely on eGovernance? eCorruption and Unmanaged Risk,” paper presented at the 11th International Anti-Corruption Conference, Seoul (May 25-28, 2003), http://www.aic.gov.au/conferences/other/smith_russell/2003-05etheft.pdf(accessed January 2, 2014).

“What Is Corruption?” Transparency International (2017), https://www.transparency.org/whatis-corruption/#define (accessed January 3, 2017).

Paul Heywood, Political Corruption: Problems and Perspective in Political Corruption (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997).