Corruption complaints,inequality and ethnic grievances in post-Biafra Nigeria

Based on anthropological field work in southeastern Nigeria, this paper explores the public concerns and everyday experience of corruption in a society still living with the legacies of the Biafran secession attempt. The paper shows how the revival of Igbo nationalism and resentment over perceived marginalisation is fuelled by perceptions that the corrupt machinery of the federal government runs against the interests of the Igbo people, and funnels resources away from the southeast as punishment for the failed separatist struggle more than 40 years ago. Hence, complaints about corruption are used to critique the Nigerian state and other regional or ethnic groups, but they also figure in an internally focused critique by Igbos of their own complicity in Nigeria’s endemic corruption.     

Law Enforcement Lessons Learned from Hurricane Katrina

Major disasters represent infrequent events that often require response organizations to vicariously learn from the experiences of others in order to improve their operations. A primary mechanism for such knowledge diffusion is the different practitioner and empirical journals for the organizational fields that comprise disaster response. A review of the literature for the law enforcement field, however, reveals that little attention is given to how these organizations manage actual disasters. In particular, the presentation of organizational experiences, whether through case studies or other methodologies, is very limited in the practitioner and empirical literature of this field. This represents a considerable problem for improvements of disaster response operations given that law enforcement agencies represent a key component in such efforts. The research presented in this article is an effort to fill this knowledge gap and thereby facilitate organizational learning to improve future law enforcement disaster response activities. The authors traveled to Mississippi and Louisiana after Hurricane Katrina to examine the response efforts of state and local law enforcement agencies to the storm. The findings from this research are reported here in a lessons‐learned format to inform law enforcement disaster response policy.     

The social sub-optimality of competitive elections

One of the common normative assumptions about elections is that competitive elections are inherently good, and non-competitive elections are problematic. This paper challenges that assumption. At the level of individual elections, competitive elections produce either sub-optimal results or trivially optimal results, but competitive elections are never uniquely optimal. In aggregation, competitive elections for a set of offices are inherently sub-optimal. From a procedural perspective, the circumstances in which competitive elections are appropriate are rare, and from a diagnostic perspective, we cannot conclude that there are problems in the electoral system based on a lack of competition. In the context of social choice theory, competitive elections are not inherently good.     

PARLIAMENTARY COMMITTEES,PUBLIC SERVANTS AND DUE PROCESS

Abstract: The parliamentary system of government in its Australian form has a number of unresolved problems, notwithstanding its many virtues. One such problem is that of the role of public servants when called before parliamentary committees as witnesses. The current guidelines are mainly advice to public servants as to how they should avoid or defer questions which neither the minister nor the departmental secretary has authorised them to answer. Of course, this is useful and proper within its limits. However, it fails to address many of the dilemmas and career-threatening choices which can face public servants who find themselves being questioned in an aggressive, hostile manner by members of a parliamentary committee. Unfair treatment of witnesses is not a trivial matter and there are more than isolated instances. This article deals with an episode involving the Joint Parliamentary Committee of Public Accounts in 1982. The case is now some years in the past, but it is still worth examining for what it teaches about gaps in our constitutional conventions. At the end of the article we suggest action in four areas. Intensive training and retraining is needed, first in the upper ranks of the public service, and secondly for chairpersons and members of parliamentary committees. Thirdly there is a need for MAB-MIAC to revisit yet again their guidelines on accountability and to instigate a review of the government's guidelines for public servants appearing as witnesses. Both sets of guidelines are anachronisms. Finally, we suggest that, in any future review of government policy in this area, consideration be given to the amendment of relevant legislation to bring due process and the protection of witnesses more closely into line with the rights available to persons appearing before a court.