From Governance Defect to Rights Violation: A Policy Agenda for Confronting Grand Corruption in Africa

Corruption in Africa is overwhelmingly framed as a governance and economic problem — a matter of weak institutions, distorted incentives and lost growth — and is tackled through institutional reform and donor conditionality. This policy paper argues that the prevailing frame is too thin to mobilise the political and legal force the problem demands, because it dissolves identifiable victims into aggregate loss and grounds its condemnation of corruption in contestable welfare arithmetic. Drawing on the established but underused proposition that grand corruption can constitute a violation of human rights, the paper explains why African policymakers should adopt a rights-based approach to grand corruption and state capture, and what such an approach entails in practice. It shows that the normative foundations already exist in the African Charter, the African Union Convention on Preventing and Combating Corruption, and the relational ethics of ubuntu, so that the shift is a retrieval of African commitments rather than an external imposition. The paper offers concrete, actor-specific recommendations for the African Union and its human rights organs, national governments, national human rights and audit institutions, the judiciary, civil society and development partners. It concludes that naming grand corruption a human rights violation changes who counts as a victim, what the state owes, and who may claim a remedy — and that this reframing offers a more powerful and locally owned basis for accountability than the managerial paradigm it complements.