Transcript
Charles Griffin: Today's discussion, which is part of our what we call our Africa Week, is about the more general issue of governance institutions in Africa, and the title is whether the accountability mechanisms are actually causing accountability or actually enable corruption in the states where they exist.
. . . So in a democratic system, of course, elections play a key role in holding politicians accountable as agents, but we all know that elections are imperfect in their ability to do that. What's also a problem, of course, and what is a major part of what we're talking about today -- even if elections worked perfectly, you would want to be able to have some accountability mechanisms that existed between elections that would help to hold politicians' focus on the what they've promised to do, and also have a consistent feedback mechanism that would hold bureaucrats accountable for the functioning of the government.
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