 GOVERNANCE NEWSMAKER INTERVIEW WITH DR. NASER AL-SANE, CHAIR OF THE ARAB REGION PARLIAMENTARIANS AGAINST CORRUPTION (ARPAC)
BY RAMI G. KHOURI
Tackling politicians is key to anti-corruption efforts
KUWAIT: When it was established in November 2004, the Arab Region Parliamentarians Against Corruption (ARPAC) charted new ground in the Arab world, where elected officials fighting corruption were a novel and unproven enterprise. Today, the founding chairman of the group, Kuwaiti MP Naser Al-Sane, describes their approach and activities in a manner that could be summarized as “shame and train”.
The “shame” reflects ARPAC’s experience in publicly speaking out against corrupt practices and naming Arab governments whose laws or practices leave much to be desired, while also repeatedly comparing Arab countries against each other. The “train” captures their focus on providing Arab parliamentarians with the tools and knowledge they need to fight corruption effectively, by building the capacity of members of Arab parliaments to weed out corruption by promoting transparency and accountability in their societies.
They combine these goals in several ongoing projects, including the publication in coming months of the first annual Arab Corruption Report and an Arab Parliamentary Guidebook on Financial Reform.
In an interview in Kuwait and Beirut in early February, he explained that ARPAC does not attempt directly to fight corruption on its own, but rather “we encourage our members to fight corruption in their own countries, and we give them the tools and the training to do so efficiently. We decided just last year, for example, to issue the Arab Corruption Report which will be launched in a few weeks time. This will allow us to measure -- between one report and the other -- to what extent there have been developments in fighting corruption, but not necessarily as a result of our organization.”
Al-Sane is a founding member of the Global Organization of Parliamentarians Against Corruption (GOPAC), which ARPAC is affiliated with. ARPAC’s founding meeting in 2004 was attended by 40 Parliamentarians representing 11 Parliaments: Jordan, Bahrain, Algeria, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Palestine, Kuwait, Egypt, Morocco, Yemen and Lebanon. Chapters have now been established in eight of those countries.
Al-Sane explained that the organization follows three main strategies for fighting corruption. “The first one is to conduct training and teaching for members of parliament, so they will know how to fight corruption. Second, we encourage networking among MPs so that everybody will learn from colleagues in other parts of the world how they are able to fight corruption. Third, we promote leadership roles through a number of organizations: any MP or ex-MP who joins our organization is supposed to assume a leadership role in society by becoming a good role model, by attracting other activists from civil society organizations, political parties, and so on, to join in these initiatives and this kind of work.”
Dr. Naser Al-Sane
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Chair of the Kuwait Parliamentary Committee on Protection of Public Funds
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Re-elected to Kuwait National Assembly July 2006, May 2008
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Member of the Select Committee, 1997
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Member of the Public Fund Protection Committee, 1994
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Elected to the Kuwait National Assembly, 1992
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Served as Assistant Undersecretary of Administrative Development, 1988-1992
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Served as Assistant Undersecretary of Administrative Development, 1988-1992
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Founding member of GOPAC and the Arab Regional Chapter- ARPAC
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Ph.D in Management from Aston University, UK
Their experience to date suggests to Al-Sane and his colleagues that keys to success for national chapters include building coalitions with the media, civil society movements and academics; prodding Arab governments to ratify the United Nations Convention against Corruption (UNCAC); and adopting a national strategy on fighting corruption that involves governments, MPs, NGOs, and others who can devise a roadmap on how to fight corruption.
A crucial element in this respect, he says, is to implement UNCAC’s recommendation that each country set up an independent national agency to fight corruption. One of ARPAC’s more successful techniques has been to compare different Arab national agencies according to their degree of genuine independence.
“Instead of criticizing such organizations, we compare them,” Al-Sane said. “We ask about the extent of independence and the involvement by potentially corrupt bodies, businesses, and so on.”
Related to this, he said, is the importance of assessing the quality and efficacy of national access to information laws. Some countries have recently passed such laws, like Jordan, he points out, “but some articles near the end of the law say that all information is supposed to be public and accessible except that which the authorities say is supposed to be confidential. That demolishes the whole thing.”
Al-Sane feels that ARPAC’s ability to compare and contrast access to information laws across the region allows it to point out weak laws and prod governments to draw up more effective ones. Making such comparisons publicly has proven to be “very effective”, including publicizing the Corruption Perception Index (CPI) issued by Transparency International every year.
The new Arab Corruption Report will build on the work of researchers across the region who will apply 13 parameters to developments in each country that reveal events that took place in either corruption or anti-corruption fields.
The most significant breakthroughs in fighting corruption, he said, come from tackling “the corruption of politicians -- ministers, MPs, political parties. Those who were able to start with the top leadership - and do it properly - are the people who have addressed the corruption issue properly. And those who avoided this have very little effect on corruption.”
He also warns that corruption happens in both good times and bad. The current global economic crisis, for example, generates new opportunities for corruption among officials and private sector firms.
“We did an analysis when oil prices were high indicating that corrupt people will have a good opportunity to grab public money, and people will not feel it because there is a lot of money around. Then when oil prices dropped, and we suffered an economic and financial crisis on the global level, we think a lot of programs aiming at saving markets are allocating billions and billions of dollars with very little transparency. So there is a great opportunity, even during crisis, for people to lose more and more due to corruption.”
He said his organization is urging activists, colleagues and MPs around the world to vigilantly monitor those organizations and individuals who are entrusted with rescuing their national economies, to make sure that hundreds of billions of dollars spent on economic bailouts are equitably distributed.
Asked if MPs have a special responsibility or capacity to fight corruption, he replied affirmatively, noting that even in countries where parliaments are weak institutions the MPs themselves are very influential members of a society.
“They have the right to ask questions, to grill whoever is in charge of any kind of public or financial action, and to vote for confidence in ministers and prime ministers. They also generate media attention, so they have to capitalize on such positions in society.”
The new Arab Parliamentary Guidebook on Financial Reform aims to help MPs carry out their responsibility to oversee the budget process.
“To do budget oversight, you have to have the necessary skills. What governments do to MPs -- if the aim is to confuse them -- is dump as much technical information as possible on Parliament and the members will not have time to look at it. They have no experience or knowledge to go through it. Our guidebook will help them enable themselves to review this material, through specialized staff and procedures.”
ARPAC is also publishing a Code of Conduct Guidebook for MPs, to make sure that they do not have conflicts of interest when they conduct their business.
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