Kuffour's law of African corruption

Former president of Ghana, John Kuffour, has an explanation for the pervasiveness of corruption in Africa. "I do not believe there is anything inherently corrupt about the presidential system of government, rather, corruption is basically enshrined in our culture," he told the audience at the 40th anniversary of the Nigeria-Britain Association.

He specifically implicated "cultural practices" that "accept gifts as a norm." It is true, as he hinted, that there is no evidence of a connection between political systems and national levels of corruption, but the confident assertion that the root of corruption in Africa is the culture of the continent itself, is unacceptably simplistic. Corruption is not original to Africa or confined to Africa.

In the first place we would like to know what Mr. Kuffour means when he refers to "our culture"? Is this Ghanaian culture, Nigerian culture, a combination of the two, or a homogenous "African" culture - jointly owned by, if not the entire continent, at least its sub-Saharan segment?

Generalisations like this do not carry within them the capacity to add value to debates about the future of the continent. By towing the line of the ‘it's our culture, so we have to live with it' argument, all that happens at best is an echo of age-old clichés that prevent Africans from making efforts to rise above the standards that have come to be associated with the continent.

In 2005, Lawrence Summers, then president of Harvard University, sparked outrage and controversy when he asserted, at a conference, that biological differences between the sexes are to blame for the phenomenon of men outperforming women in math and the sciences.

The UK's Guardian newspaper reported Donna Nelson, a chemistry professor at the University of Oklahoma, as saying, in response to Summers' comments: "I have heard men make comments like this my entire life and quite honestly if I had listened to them I would never have done anything." That argument deserves to be extrapolated to the debate on the link between corruption and culture in Africa. If Africa continues to listen to such arguments, it will never make appreciable progress. Such arguments need to be fought and resisted.

Let us remind ourselves of Chinua Achebe's immortal words, while outlining the mission of his art: "I would be quite satisfied if my novels (especially the ones I set in the past) did no more than teach my readers that their past - with all its imperfections - was not one long night of savagery from which the first Europeans acting on God's behalf delivered them." Mr. Kuffour's thesis is arguably only the latest in a line of ‘long night of savagery' arguments about Africa, which are of course neither original, nor illuminating.

James Watson, known for his groundbreaking work - which earned him a Nobel Prize for DNA research, attracted fiery condemnation two years ago when he suggested that black people were less intelligent than whites and that this difference had a genetic basis. One critic described his comments as "baseless, unscientific and extremely offensive." If not "extremely offensive", Mr. Kuffour's observation is also baseless and unscientific.

Only a few years ago a headline of the weekly newsmagazine, The Economist, referred to "Africa" as "The Hopeless Continent." In one breath, an incredibly diverse continent had been packaged, and labelled in a manner so flippant as to be unforgivably irresponsible.

Let us state again that corruption is not original to Africa or confined to Africa.African countries need all the encouragement they can get, to muster the political will to fight corruption. Defeatist arguments like the one propounded by Mr. Kuffour do nothing else but deflate this will.