In an outstanding example of the law of unintended consequences, anti-corruption campaigns costing millions of pounds are making people more likely to offer bribes, studies in Nigeria have shown.
Research carried out in Lagos, the west African state’s most crowded city, found that promotions encouraging people to reject corrupt acts often inspired them to go along with sleaze.
Informing the public that corruption is a huge problem makes them believe it is too big an issue to be resolved, Nic Cheeseman, one of the researchers, said. “That makes people more likely to go with the flow than stand up to the system — the exact opposite of what anti-corruption messages are trying to achieve.”
President Buhari, 77, has won two elections largely on an anti-corruption platform. Yet his limited progress is reflected in Transparency International’s latest annual corruption index, which puts Nigeria 146 out of 180 countries, its lowest ever ranking. Chatham House, a British think tank, estimates that $582 billion has been stolen from Nigeria since independence in 1960.
Each year international aid agencies and civil society groups funnel millions of pounds into short films, advertisements and social media campaigns that warn of the dangers of corruption. Professor Cheeseman, of the University of Birmingham, and Caryn Peiffer, of the University of Bristol, say that the campaigns often make things worse.
To test the impact of anti-corruption messages, the democracy and development specialists developed five short narratives that were read to 2,400 people in Lagos. One message explained that corruption was widespread and damaging. Others emphasised its local impact and that it wasted citizens’ taxes.
To test the effect of more positive messages, one narrative talked about recent successes that political leaders had had in curbing corruption. Another detailed the role that religious leaders played in promoting clean government.
Those subjects were randomly selected for 1,200 participants to play a game with a chance to win money, allowing researchers to see how anti-corruption messages shaped behaviour. Players could take away more cash if they were willing to pay a small bribe to the “banker” who determined the payout.
Positive or negative, the effect of the messages was the same. “None of the narratives we used had a positive effect overall,” Professor Cheeseman said. “Many of them actually made Lagosians more likely to pay a bribe.”
Studies in Costa Rica, Indonesia and Papua New Guinea have come up with similar conclusions.
Decades of corrupt governance and economic mismanagement have left Nigeria’s economy failing to keep pace with its growing population. It is on track to overtake America as the world’s third most populous country by 2050, with 400 million people, so the need to tackle corruption is urgent.
Professor Cheeseman said that Lagos State had made some progress towards reducing government waste and ensuring that everybody pays tax. He said: “If messages can persuade citizens that people like them are standing up to corruption, and leaders are taking it seriously, perhaps they can be nudged into believing it is a problem that can be overcome — especially if these messages go hand-in-hand with high profile prosecutions and falling graft.”
– The Times UK.