Eighteen years ago, Kenya was the first country to sign and ratify the United Nations Convention Against Corruption, the bedrock for the transnational fight against graft.
It is still a hugely significant convention, but the world has also changed significantly since 2003.
So this week’s virtual Conference of Heads of Anti-Corruption Agencies in Africa is a good time to reflect on how we must work together to modernise the fight against graft.
The most obvious change has been the global pandemic that has forced swathes of the world’s investigative agencies to stay away from the office, while governments scramble to procure protective equipment and vaccines.
However, the fast pace of technological development has also made life easier for the corrupt and harder for those trying to catch them.
Who would have envisaged 18 years ago that it would be possible to move money from one country to another via a smartphone app in a few minutes?
Or change Kenyan shillings to bitcoins and back again in the time it takes to boil a kettle?
It is clear that governments that enact legislation, and the agencies whose role is enforcing the laws, need to work harder than ever – not only to adapt to the abuse of technology for criminal and corrupt purposes but also to embrace how technology can be utilised to fight corruption and organised crime.
In reality, this is not easy. Laws are not written quickly, unlike the new apps and digital platforms that tech companies continue to churn out.
Laws stop at national borders, whereas criminals can reside on a borderless digital planet.
This means a money launderer can transfer thousands of dollars at the touch of a button to another country, but to get the evidence of that transaction from another country can easily take the investigator six months and sometimes several years.
Now multiply that transaction several hundred or even a thousand times, and you can imagine how much Kenya is losing to graft, and how hard it is to keep up for investigators.
What can we do other than give up and go home?
Well, for a start, we can improve our capability to capture evidence from the computers, phones and other digital media in the possession of suspects.
There are also technological developments that law enforcement can utilise such as software to analyse bank statements and hardware to crack encrypted applications.
With the right training, investigators can follow blockchain transactions to trace money laundered through cryptocurrencies.
All of this requires investment, which is in short supply as countries begin to recover from the economic tsunami emanating from the pandemic and as international donors tighten their belts.
This is unlikely to change in the near future. But you have to speculate to accumulate, and this is never more applicable than in recovering stolen assets.
Kenya’s Ethics and Anti-Corruption Commission recovered over Sh11 billion last year, 300 per cent more than the previous year, with some of the money used to fund the Covid-19 pandemic response.
Investing in technology and training to help our law enforcement officers address modern forms of corruption and money laundering, and recover the stolen assets, is a no-brainer even in bare economic terms.
However, as high-tech as our law enforcement officers are becoming, they can do nothing without cooperation at the domestic and international level.
The UNCAC recognises this in articles 48 and 49, which give member states very wide possibilities for working jointly or collaboratively on investigations or for sharing relevant information.
Covid-19 has taught us that we can do a lot more through digital interfaces than we thought we could.
Some countries are embracing digital cooperation possibilities, for instance by accepting and returning evidential requests via email, cutting waiting times and bureaucracy.
Others still insist on formal diplomatic channels, which can make the process very ponderous and gives criminals more time to hide or spend their money.
But before we go chastising other countries, we also need to see what can be done to modernise domestic collaboration.
In Kenya, the multi-agency task force is working hard to coordinate a joint approach in tackling corruption, but there is more we can do to support their work.
Online portals to access company and land records would save precious time. A move away from letters to digital platforms for sharing intelligence would speed things up no end.
And an electronic system to flag investigations to a particular agency would mitigate the risk of duplication.
On the positive side, we are seeing success in the use of modern asset recovery techniques such as non-conviction based forfeiture, ie going after the illicit assets rather than the person.
This is an important complement to criminal conviction based forfeiture and can in some cases be a much more efficient procedure to recover illicitly obtained assets.
Kenya has recently recovered stolen assets using its law against illicit enrichment, a topic about which the Basel Institute on Governance recently published an open-access book.
So there will be plenty to discuss at the meeting of the Commonwealth Heads of Anti-Corruption Agencies on how we can learn from one another and work together to modernise the fight against graft.
Commonwealth Secretary-General Baroness Patricia Scotland in her address summed up the challenge precisely by saying tackling corruption and succeeding in asset recovery requires a collective global effort and working collaboratively. We are dependent on each other, she said.
We need to come together to change up a couple of gears, put the pedal to the metal and show we can move into a post-pandemic environment where fighting corruption is an objective that has no borders and no barriers.
Simon Marsh works as a specialist international consultant for the EACC
