Third of Africans have paid bribe in last year, survey finds

Nearly one-third of Africans polled as part of an assessment of corruption across the continent said they had paid a bribe to obtain a service or avoid a problem over a 12-month period.

Released yesterday in Senegal, the Afrobarometer survey of people on their corruption perception in Africa revealed that the majority of respondents believe their governments are doing a poor job in fighting corruption, and they do not trust the anti-corruption measures they are implementing.

The report, Governments Falter in Fight to Curb Corruption: The people give most a failing grade, found negative ratings in relation to government efforts to tackle corruption had increased since 2002 in all but five of the 16 countries that participated in the first survey over a decade ago.

Sierra Leone in West Africa fared the worst overall when it came to bribing officials, with 63 per cent of respondents saying they had paid up at least once in the previous year. Morocco and Guinea came next, each with 57 per cent.

“The negative ratings surface despite the fact that eradicating corruption and improving governance in Africa have been priority for most major international organisations and many political leaders since the mid-1990s,’’ the report stated. “More than five in every 10 people (56 per cent) say their governments are doing a poor job of fighting corruption.’’

Botswana was the country where the least amount of bribes were paid, with only 4 per cent of respondents saying they paid off an official.

Africa’s poor were found to pay bribes more often than its better-off citizens, with almost one in five people (18 per cent) who had gone without enough to eat in the past year forced to bribe a government official to obtain medical treatment. This is compared with just 12 per cent of respondents who said they never went without food.

Battling graft
Nigerians gave the worst ratings to their government on its efforts to battle graft. Some 82 per cent there said the government was doing fairly or very badly. Other large groups of citizens unhappy with their state's efforts were in Egypt, Zimbabwe and Uganda.

Police attracted the highest ratings of corruption across all the countries, with 43 per cent of people saying “most” or “all” of them are involved in corruption. Experience of poverty is also linked to higher perceived levels of corruption, especially in the justice sector.

The corruption perceptions in Africa were based on interviews with nearly 52,000 people in 34 counties between October 2011 and June 2013.