Making pandemic politics transparent: lessons from Nigeria.
| Author | Roelofs, Portia |
| Position | THE NHS AFTER COVID-19 |
This year, the UK ranked among the top twenty least corrupt countries in the world. (1) Yet, as the details of the government's pandemic procurement emerge, it's hard to ignore how many contracts have gone to the family members and close associates of senior Conservative Party and Downing Street figures. Whilst Nigeria might not be the first country to spring to mind when you think of good governance, research from the country's southwest offers ways of rethinking transparency to better address the current crisis.
The word transparency conjures images of budgets on websites, the publication of figures and statistics, and crusades to get complex legal documents into the public domain. Two decades of good governance programmes around the world have promoted this vision of transparency by making more data more easily accessible. Diverse schemes, ranging from Data.gov in the US, to Ugandan government initiatives to publish schools' budgets in local newspapers, have been set up to advance this goal. The hope is that ordinary people will be empowered to sift through it and better hold their governments to account. Indeed, with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, transparency seems increasingly tied to complex debates over data analysis. (2) Yet, there are common-sense limitations to transparency's democratic potential when it is only understood in this data-focused way.
My research shows that transparency can be understood in different ways. Each of these has different political consequences. (3) The 'transparency in data' approach is unsurprisingly rather off-putting to the average citizen: it puts power in the hands of those who 'speak the language' of account, audits and procurement law. As Thandika Mkandawire, the late Professor of African Development at LSE, argued, democracy suffers when accountability is equated with accounting. (4) In contrast to the inevitable complexity of 'transparency in data', the 'transparency in people' approach offers a much more immediate picture of how power operates. Transparency in people means making visible the connections between powerful actors and the social networks in which they are embedded.
The concept of transparency in people is especially useful in a country like the UK, which is among the most unequal countries in the OECD, and where cultural, political and economic power is concentrated in the hands of a narrow demographic. The role of elite institutions, like private schools and Oxbridge, in reproducing the ruling class is well documented, but transparency in people invites us to shine a light on specific personal relationships and networks.
Take for example the NHSX COVID Data contract, a key part of Britain's belated efforts to build an infrastructure for responding to the COVID-19 pandemic. Looking at this through the lens of transparency in data would foreground an investigation of the...
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