Sarcouncil Journal of Public Administration and Management

Abstract: The question of why anti-corruption bodies have mushroomed in Ghana and Nigeria, but not in terms of their effectiveness of enforcement is addressed. It hypothesizes that the Ghanaian Office of the Special Prosecutor (OSP) and the Nigerian Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) are dual-purpose bodies which are structurally bound up in informal elite bargains over when to conduct rational-legal administration on politically connected targets. Here, the paper looks at three aspects: selective prosecutorial treatment of the two commissions, failure to implement the two whistleblowing protection regimes (Ghana’s Whistleblower Act and Nigeria’s non-statutory whistleblowing policy) and the disconnect between technical quality of the two supreme audit reports and weak follow-up by the parliamentary Public Accounts Committee in both countries. Available case evidence indicates that formal autonomy and the extent of the mandate are weak predictors of enforcement results in both countries based on available case evidence: the closer the ruled party is politically to the ruling party, the lower the chances of enforcement. This is because, in addition to Meyer and Rowan’s notion of organizational isomorphism, there is a concept of donor-driven institutional isomorphism, which can account for the formal isomorphism of the anti-corruption architecture between the two countries without resulting in full isomorphism. The paper concludes that reforms to build or consolidate institutions will be unlikely to lead to an effective change without at least ensuring that key chokepoints (case selection discretion, whistle-blowing enforcement, and the authority of the Public Accounts Committee) are no longer directly controlled by politicians and recommends the use of this hybrid-function analysis to other cases in West Africa.