Despite widespread expectations of corrupt behaviour, opportunities exist to harness public disapproval to combat corruption.
This research paper has revealed widespread beliefs that judges in Nigeria are corrupt, with 61 per cent of respondents in the Chatham House survey expecting bribery in case judgments. Despite the expectation of commonplace judicial bribe-taking, disapproval remains high, with 88 per cent opposing the behaviour mainly based on moral objections. Most respondents, however, are unaware that others in their community share their disapproval, which may exacerbate the problem and discourage collective action against corruption due to fear of social backlash. This is further complicated by the difficulty of disciplining judges and the failure of existing reforms and oversight bodies. As a result, reform initiatives must consider social expectations and institutional drivers of corruption, integrating them into strategies that involve social-sanctioning and transparency mechanisms, alongside sincere and bold political support. These efforts should aim to bolster community dialogue and leverage communal disapproval to combat corruption. Likewise, understanding and addressing in-group pressures within judicial networks, supported by robust disciplinary actions, can help with transforming expectations and standards. Comprehensive reform should also encompass all elements of the justice system and ensure continuous oversight through mechanisms like social audits of courts.
In addition, the research highlights widespread corruption scepticism of public procurement among Nigerians, with 74 per cent expecting procurement officials to inflate contracts for personal gain and 78 per cent anticipating similar corruption in road projects. But an overwhelming majority again disapprove of such practices, indicating the power of moral objections rooted in the belief that corruption undermines public service delivery. These findings underscore the need to shift collective beliefs regarding public opinion to activate collective action against corruption at community level (i.e. narrowing the disapproval–collective action gap). Recommended strategies include fostering deliberate dialogue, involving credible facilitators, to expose the true extent of public disapproval, implementing simplified public contracting information and technology, and enhancing citizen involvement in procurement processes. However, success depends on comprehensive societal engagement, the public’s ability to use oversight tools, and root-and-branch reform of the justice sector.
The Chatham House survey also reveals a high level of legal knowledge among Nigerians, with more than 87 per cent of respondents recognizing the illegality of judicial bribery, contract inflation and procurement fraud. Interestingly, there remains a strong belief in the effectiveness of anti-corruption agencies like the ICPC and EFCC in areas such as FCT-Abuja. Conversely, in Adamawa and Benue states, the media and traditional institutions, respectively, are viewed as more important avenues for reporting corruption. Rural respondents show higher expectations of accountability from traditional leaders, highlighting their continued importance in enforcing social norms and performance contracts. These findings underscore the potential for tailored anti-corruption strategies that consider the sociopolitical context of each state. However, further research is crucial to understanding local differences and context-specific social norms, and fully harnessing the impact of local institutions in anti-corruption work in Nigeria.
Nigeria urgently needs a new type of governance model for tackling corruption – one that is rooted in the strong anti-corruption sentiments shared by its citizens.
By emphasizing the high negative empirical expectations across three interrelated corrupt behaviours, this research paper also sheds light on how and why corruption in Nigeria’s judicial system and procurement sector can be so resistant to formal reform programmes. Corruption reinforces, and is reinforced by, social expectations, despite overwhelming levels of disapproval of the practices among individuals. Future efforts at reform must therefore engage with informal drivers of these social expectations as part of a whole-of-society approach to anti-corruption. Seen in this light, efforts to strengthen accountability should also consider socio-cultural processes and the role of public pressure on institutions and government. Interventions to expose gaps in perception between the individual and community can help galvanize collective action – closing the gap between public disapproval and collective action – and support bottom-up accountability demands.
Nigeria urgently needs a new type of governance model for tackling corruption – one that is rooted in the strong anti-corruption sentiments shared by its citizens. Such a model would be more effective if it created a transparent and accountable bond between Nigerians and the country’s bureaucratic institutions, and leveraged key sites of social approval (for example, religious and other traditional institutions, along with the media).
This paper’s findings do not suggest that socio-cultural processes and collective action by citizens, communities and traditional institutions are a substitute for the structural changes and sincere political will essential to fostering greater accountability in the judiciary and public procurement sector. But these efforts can at least help create new expectations for the behaviour of public officials, institutions and government contractors. For example, the findings regarding the perceived effectiveness of anti-corruption agencies are indicative of public support and should reinforce the mandate and efforts of these agencies. Alongside the SNAG project’s consistent finding in its research of individuals’ personal disapproval of corrupt behaviours, the paper also suggests potential entry points for collective action towards greater accountability in Nigeria.
Recommendations for strengthening accountability
The following recommendations are based on the research findings set out in this paper, and are intended for policymakers and anti-corruption practitioners
in Nigeria:
- Motivate and mobilize citizens to challenge their elected representatives regarding specific community needs and government allocations. Sustained and well-directed public pressure can be effective in pushing decision-makers to recognize the public’s interests and act accordingly. However, this approach is hampered by the vested interests, impunity and durable resistance of Nigeria’s political elite to accountability. Systemic forms of corruption can only be broken
down by the reinvigorated voices and agency of citizens in matters of governance
and politics.
- Conduct research to identify in-group norms of behaviour and expectation among judges, and the relationships of the legal and law-enforcement sectors to the wider community. Such insights would enhance the design of network-specific anti-corruption interventions that best target the corruption opportunities and pressures within the justice sector’s tightly bound social networks, which have strong links to the political elite.
- Encourage an increased role for non-legal communities (including civil society, media and academia) in creating and monitoring anti-corruption mechanisms. These may include socially embedded public pledges for judges, supporting judicial networks for enforcing and maintaining such integrity pledges, and establishing social accountability directly to the communities that individual courts serve. Such efforts will need to be designed to complement others seeking to address the practical reasons behind acceptance of corrupt behaviour – including slow court processes, underfunding and understaffing.
- Recalibrate anti-corruption interventions to take account of prevailing expectations, which can contribute to apathy and a sense of fatalism about service delivery and the rule of law. Such recalibration would involve discarding sensationalist anti-corruption messaging that emphasizes the prevalence or punishment of corrupt practices that most citizens believe are commonplace. Moralistic messaging in the form of value-laden campaign rhetoric or sensationalist language is more likely to lead to desensitization if law enforcement institutions are known to be weak and the judiciary is believed to also be corrupt. Instead, messaging should be audience- and action-specific (for example, reporting corruption to credible authorities or encouraging citizens to pressure their elected leaders to carry out specific actions, and informing citizens as to how they can mount an effective pressure campaign). Because of the risks of these efforts backfiring or raising apathy rather than awareness, it is important for messaging campaigns to be clear on their desired outcomes and be delivered by credible messengers.
- Create socially embedded public commitments or performance contracts for public officials and government contractors. Public contracts and performance contracts must leverage social pride and the shame of failure to socially incentivize public officials and contractors to reject corruption. Such community monitoring efforts can be enhanced via greater attention to civic education on the responsibilities of public officials and importance of integrity, the simplification of public-contracting information and tracking technology, and increased accessibility at the community level. On the latter point in particular, online procurement portals are growing in popularity in Nigeria and can be a vital tool if regularly updated, and if consideration is given to accompanying communications strategies that tap into strong public disapproval of procurement corruption.
- Highlight the strong level of consensus around social disapproval of corruption. Provision of information about social disapproval can be localized and targeted at specific procurement units or private contractor groups (for example, in a specific community or industry), so these can be used to ‘seed’ new norms and coordinate network relations around new codes of business and practice. Messaging around new norms must be extensively tested and contextually piloted before scaling, to ensure that it leads to positive norm changes rather than reinforcing corrupt practices.
- Localize interventions to make them more effective at influencing unsustainable and unpopular practices. Such an approach has contributed to measurable impact on anti-corruption in Nigeria’s maritime sector, for example, and could be effective in tackling local-level procurement and construction fraud.
- Leverage public faith in the ability of anti-corruption agencies to develop a more community-centred corruption prevention approach and local engagement on corruption law enforcement. Such an approach must be sensitive to state-level variation and, where applicable, involve working with trusted and credible local institutions or individuals (as indicated by preferences expressed in the SNAG survey), such as the media or traditional leaders.
