Tackling judicial bribery and procurement fraud in Nigeria

Corruption is central to Nigeria’s challenges with insecurity, injustice, inequality and poor public goods and services. Amid consistently low levels of public spending, the misappropriation of those scarce public funds is causing real harm to citizens. This situation is worsened by a weak and compromised judicial system that allows elites to insulate themselves from accountability. These interdependent and intersectional failings in Nigeria’s public sector provide a key example of the systemic challenges posed by corruption. While Nigeria has taken some steps towards reform, these efforts have predominately focused on tweaking top-down formal rules and structures, with little or no consideration given to informal dynamics that may enable and perpetuate corrupt practices. The third household survey by the Chatham House Africa Programme’s Social Norms and Accountable Governance (SNAG) project, conducted in 2022, found that a large majority of Nigerians consider judicial bribery, contract inflation and procurement fraud to be unacceptable. However, most Nigerians also assume these practices to be extremely common, despite the widespread disapproval recorded in the survey. Some 61 per cent of survey respondents believed that judges in Nigeria were likely to accept bribes to influence their rulings. These expectations are further heightened by sociopolitical factors, political interference, the contested relationship between Nigeria’s executive and judiciary, nepotism that contributes to a lack of transparency and merit in the appointment and elevation of judges to higher courts, and a culture of lobbying for position among judges. Existing judicial networks – the formal and informal ties that first connect judges to each other and to legal professionals and court officials – are believed to exert pressure on individual judges to fall in line with existing corrupt practices that undermine the rule of law and harm prospects for institutionalizing accountable governance. Respectively, 74 per cent and 78 per cent of respondents expected officials in charge of state procurement and private contractors to routinely divert money from public contracts for personal use. Procurement officials and contractors alike face strong social expectations that they will engage in fraudulent behaviour and be pressured to reciprocate procurement opportunities, indicating a self-sustaining pattern of corruption that is resistant to top-down reform. Despite these expectations, across each of the corrupt behaviours considered in the survey, respondents were systematically mistaken about the attitudes of other people in their community towards judicial bribery, contract inflation or diversion of contract funds. Respectively, 88 per cent, 85 per cent and 88 per cent of respondents personally disapproved of each one of these practices. But many also believed that more of their friends, family and neighbours approved of corruption than was actually the case. These findings indicate that effective anti-corruption in part depends on addressing a problem of collective action – people do not act against corruption because they assume that they have no allies to cooperate with to challenge bad practices. This insight suggests that ensuring that Nigerians know that their distaste for bribery and embezzlement is shared by others in their communities could be an effective way of building pressure on officials to act. Widespread public disapproval of judicial bribery signals the potential for non-legal communities (including academia, civil society and media) to take an enhanced role in creating and monitoring public pledges by judges, and supporting judicial networks in enforcing such commitments to integrity. At the same time, strong negative attitudes towards procurement fraud provide a potential foundation for community monitoring efforts such as simplification and improved accessibility of public contracting information at the community level, including through appropriately accessible online procurement portals. Nigerians do have faith in the ability of institutions – especially anti-corruption agencies – to take appropriate steps towards accountability. There is therefore a chance for policymakers and organizations to leverage this public confidence to develop community-centred measures around corruption prevention and local engagement on anti-corruption law enforcement. However, significant state-level variation in the survey findings means that institutions responsible for anti-corruption must be sensitive in their approach and, where possible, work with trusted local organizations and individuals, such as the media and traditional leaders.