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In mid-July, I participated in the Conference on the Financialization of Politics in Africa that was held in Accra, Ghana. The conference brought together various stakeholders from the continent, with representatives from the African Union, governments, civil society, and development partners. The conference was organized by the Community of Practice on Money in Politics with the support of the Centre for Democratic Development in Ghana (CDD-Ghana), the Open Society Foundations (OSF), and the African Union Advisory Board Against Corruption (AUABC). The aim of both the Community of Practice and the conference was to begin structuring meaningful engagement between stakeholders who are committed to deepening democracy and integrity in Africa by curtailing the growing influence of money in politics.
The conference succeeded in developing a strongly shared understanding of the nature and extent of the problem at hand with respect to the increasingly central role that finance is playing in African politics, both within and outside electoral seasons. During elections, it is widely understood that money plays an important role in determining who makes it to the ballot and, more often than not, how they fare in the election. A series of studies by the Westminster Foundation for Democracy (WFD) and their partners have shown how expensive it is for people to run for office in Africa. Their latest studies, conducted in 2020 and 2021, found that it costs an average of US$68,215 for a parliamentary seat in Ghana and US$182,000 in Kenya. These are high figures that end up excluding from political competition people with limited access to finance, especially women and youth. Hence, it is often noted that many of the young people and women who get into politics often rely on sponsors and godfathers. Of course, some are independently wealthy, which often raises speculation about the source of their wealth. These are important issues to engage with and address with respect to the exclusionary nature of expensive elections, not just for women and youth, but also for other marginalized groups.
Vote buying
One issue that seems to have occupied much of our attention is the question of vote buying. It is often believed that most of the money that is spent in politics goes towards voter bribery. As the argument goes, vote buying is a problem because it distorts political choices and is therefore a major threat to democracy. A lot of work and investment by democracy promoters have gone into this area, piquing the interest of my friend and colleague Dr Sae’ed Husaini. Writing based on an ethnographic, comparative study of four different locations in Nigeria, he argues that this focus may be misplaced. He finds that vote buying is neither as prevalent nor as effective as the focus we place on it suggests. That is, most people do not actually receive the money that is supposedly distributed by politicians and many of those who receive it believe that they are free to make their choices independent of these inducements.
There are many potential case studies to look at, but Kenya presents some interesting recent examples that offer great fodder for analysis. In the recent by-election in Ol Kalou, the ruling party invested heavily in inducements to voters and still lost embarrassingly. Even noting that by-elections are quite different from general elections, we can examine how the money was flowing to get a more refined sense of the extent of the distribution of funds and also explore why it was not effective in swaying the voter to support the incumbent government.
However, leaving voter suppression aside for now, we must also compare this with the preceding by-elections, such as in Mbeere North where, with heavy inducements during the campaign, the ruling party emerged victorious. Such an analysis would help us obtain a richer view that will further enhance our understanding of this phenomenon. Similar studies across other African countries may help to build a strong body of evidence that would challenge prevailing orthodoxy and perhaps allow for more room to engage on other questions on the impact of financialization on politics and policy.
Looking beyond elections
It is an issue of concern that the conversation on the financialization of politics often focuses on elections, with less attention being paid to how money is also a tool for purchasing policy outcomes in the period between elections. It is true that financiers invest in electoral competition to get their preferred candidates into office so that they can shape their agenda or obtain favours from leaders. However, this is just one side of the coin. The other is that there are actors who do not become involved in the electoral processes but deploy money to engage with those who get elected and with bureaucrats in order to shape policy processes and outcomes.
Expanding the purview of analysis beyond elections helps us to also recognize the need to look beyond the predominant concern about “dirty money” in politics. Money, whether it is termed clean or dirty, is deployed by various actors to serve their interests in political processes. The predominant focus on corruption and illicit financial flows ends up being reductionist, constraining the possibilities of democratic scrutiny, while other flows of money can prove to be just as damaging if not more so. For instance, investments by technology companies in political processes that are ostensibly geared towards facilitation of technological advancements or to enhance access to technology can be spectacularly insidious. Yet, while the intentions of those who invest “dirty money” – such as the proceeds of corruption or transnational crime – in politics are treated as suspicious, the contribution of what is viewed as “clean money” is rarely seen as a problem. The truth, however, is that the consequences can be just as dire no matter the source of the finance.
This is to say that, as we examine the impact of illicit financial flows in our politics, we must also pay attention to the licit flows, including money from the Bretton Woods Institutions (World Bank and IMF), development partners, local private sector players, and others. The way to do this, to my mind, is to bring back the ordinary citizen into the centre of this work. One approach to take here is to focus on the impact of financialization of politics and policy on the lives of ordinary African people, no matter the source. To me, this suggests a need for serious policy impact analysis that can reveal potential perverse incentives and consequences before policies are adopted and implemented. This would be a good avenue for revealing often hidden interests. Such analysis should be mandated for all policies. There’s further work in building the power of citizens to push back on policy choices that do not serve their interests, essentially enabling them to counter the effects of money. This requires serious investments in civic education as well as development of impact analysis methodologies and toolkits that can democratize these processes.
Space for regulation?
The Conference in Ghana placed significant focus on the United Nations Convention Against Corruption (UNCAC) Resolution 11/7 on “Preventing and Combating Corruption through Enhancing Transparency in the Funding of Political Parties, Candidatures for Elected Public Office and Electoral Campaigns”. The resolution was adopted by consensus at the 11th Conference of the States Parties (CoSP11) to the UNCAC in Doha, Qatar, in December 2025. It is celebrated as the first comprehensive global agreement focused specifically on political finance transparency and integrity. A key focus of the conference was on the development of a Model Law by the AU, under the auspices of the AU Advisory Board on Corruption (AUABC), that African countries can rely on as they embark on efforts to regulate the financialization of politics. While this is important, regulation and the model law should not become an end in themselves. There is value in learning lessons from previous AU Model Laws and how they have fared, and in considering what the impact of regulating political conduct has been across the various African countries. For instance, outlawing vote buying in Senegal in 1992 seems to have done little to curb the practice. The question that must remain is what the model law will do differently in its development, adoption, and monitoring so that it actually helps to move the needle in terms of changing political conduct.
Another crucial issue that will be an important anchor to this regulation agenda is solid, Africa-driven, empirical research that teases out the ways in which democratic systems operate in various countries and how money interfaces with these dynamics. Crucially, this suggests shifting the prioritization of the engagement from continental initiatives to national-level insight before building back to the continental level. For instance, in many of these conversations, political parties are seen as strong actors and arbiters of democracy. This is the reason why they are often seen as the basis for the regulation of politics, including curbing the financialization of politics. Interestingly, there were quite a number of registrars of political parties present at the conference sharing varied experiences with the regulation of political parties. No doubt, strengthening these agencies to be stronger in their oversight roles is important but certainly needs to be one of many interventions.
That being said, we must acknowledge that, across the continent, political parties are really varied and diverse in their nature. They vary widely in terms of type, strength and effectiveness across the various countries. In some countries such as Ghana and Nigeria, the parties are strongly institutionalized. In contrast, parties in Kenya are often the personal property of their leaders and hardly last beyond two or three electoral cycles. In some cases, parties can control their candidates but in others it is the candidates that control the party. Additionally, where politics is structured around single-member constituencies, the individual candidates may be more significant as a site for the flows of finance than the party. In any case, even within the political parties, power and influence is not distributed equally; a few individuals may yield extreme power, whether formally or informally, and shape the direction that parties take. This is to say that regulating political parties without having a mechanism for controlling individual candidates may essentially constitute a wild-goose chase. In sum, any efforts aimed at addressing this phenomenon must be localised.
Beyond the conference
A crucial factor in the success of this kind of conversations and efforts is that they must be inclusive. Otherwise, there is a risk that major factors in the political economy of the financialization of politics gets missed, rendering very serious and strong efforts meaningless. For instance, the focus on elections severely constricts these conversations, leaving out the other ways in which money flows into political systems and impacts people. Notably, the consideration of bureaucracies and bureaucrats was largely absent from the conversation in Ghana, perhaps due to the composition of the participants in the conference. Another element that was missing from the conference was the voices of the political parties and politicians, save for a few from Ghana. The voices of bureaucrats, politicians and other stakeholders such as religious leaders and traditional chiefs will also need to be factored in. Indeed, there were several concerns about mainstreaming gender and youth in the conference. In other words, the tent will need to be enlarged to allow for as many perspectives as possible at the table. That is the only way we can develop an intervention agenda with any chance of success.
The foregoing raises many dimensions that this work can take as well as the gaps that need to be plugged. Crucially, I believe fundamentally in the need to avoid ending up in a regulatory swamp where the aim is to create more and more regulation. The promise, to me, lies in going back to the starting point; asking what democracy is, who and what it is for, and examining how we’ve veered from it. If democracy is about governance that generates fair, equitable and justifiable policy outcomes that serve to protect rights and the dignity of our people, then a consequentialist approach that centres on the question of what outcomes policy processes generate is going to be the pathway. To my mind, the way to address this is to attempt to construct a broader question that can capture multiple dimensions. We can do this by shifting the focus from an institutional approach to considering the consequences of the financialization of politics. The question I would propose to guide this effort is: To what extent and in what ways does money disempower ordinary citizens in Africa in electoral and policy processes and how can this be alleviated?
In turn, this means having robust mechanisms for analysing policy processes and outcomes and strengthening power structures that can effectively question and challenge policy actors, processes and outcomes. This can take many forms, ranging from strengthening media and civil society organizations for oversight roles, supporting citizens’ grassroots movements and establishing new avenues of holding power to account, to investigative journalism and strategic litigation that exposes and challenges the opaque ways in which money influences political and policy choices. These ideas are very well captured in the “Accra Declaration on the Financialization of Politics to advance democracy in Africa”, which was adopted at the conference that stipulates the roles of the various stakeholders in this work. Partners at the global, regional, and national levels have committed to pushing this agenda forward. Undoubtedly, these are important efforts that should continue to be developed. However, my argument here is that the conversation must not remain one of regulation but should also include broader, more innovative, albeit messy experiments that might allow us to take a broader perspective.
