The African Union’s elaborate anti-corruption and governance framework will have little impact unless member states move beyond adopting laws and institutions to enforcing them and imposing visible consequences for violations, the Chairperson of the African Union Advisory Board Against Corruption (AUABC), Edem Senanu, has cautioned.
He said Africa had made significant progress in establishing continental rules and institutions to promote accountability, transparency and good governance, but a persistent gap between commitments and implementation continued to undermine public trust.
Mr Senanu made the observation in a presentation on “The Accountability Deficit: Corruption, Transparency and Public Trust” at the 2026 Students and Young Professionals African Liberty Academy (SYPALA) at the University of Professional Studies, Accra (UPSA), on Wednesday, August 26.
The four-day programme, convened by the IMANI Centre for Policy and Education in partnership with UPSA, brought together young people from across Africa to engage in discussions on governance, economic freedom, development and public policy.
Beyond laws
Mr Senanu’s presentation examined whether the African Union (AU) was delivering on its governance and anti-corruption commitments and challenged participants to assess the continent’s performance not by the number of treaties signed or institutions created but by tangible results.
He noted that the AU had developed a broad governance architecture comprising instruments such as the African Union Convention on Preventing and Combating Corruption, the African Charter on Democracy, Elections and Governance and Agenda 2063.
Institutions such as the AUABC and the African Peer Review Mechanism (APRM) also provide platforms for monitoring, peer learning and promoting accountability.
However, he said the effectiveness of those mechanisms depended heavily on the willingness and capacity of member states to translate continental commitments into action.
The presentation assessed the AU as relatively strong in rule-making, moderate in institution-building and monitoring, but weak in enforcement and consequences, with its impact on public trust remaining insufficient.
Mr Senanu said the central challenge was the implementation gap, pointing out that the existence of laws and anti-corruption institutions did not automatically guarantee independence, adequate resources or effective enforcement.
“Ratification, legislation and institutional creation do not establish independence, resources or enforcement,” the presentation noted.
According to him, the accountability deficit has consequences that extend beyond public administration and financial management.
It affects the distribution of public resources, the quality and cost of public services, the competitiveness of businesses and citizens’ confidence in state institutions.
The presentation noted that scarce resources could be diverted, the cost of public services increased and poorer communities were disproportionately affected when accountability systems were weak.
It further cited data from Afrobarometer showing that across 39 surveyed African countries, fewer than half of respondents trusted presidents, the police or the courts, while only 37 per cent expressed trust in Parliament.
Mr Senanu therefore argued that transparency should not end with the publication of government reports.
For information to translate into accountability, he said, citizens must be able to understand what has happened, which recommendations remain outstanding and whether those responsible for wrongdoing have faced appropriate consequences.
From paper to performance
He proposed that the AU should measure its governance performance through a chain covering five areas: commitment, institutional capacity, actual practice, consequences and public value.
That approach, he said, would help prevent what he described as “paper compliance”, where countries receive credit for adopting laws without demonstrating that those laws are being enforced.
Among the reforms proposed were the establishment of a public AU accountability dashboard to track country commitments and implementation, strengthening the independence and capacity of the AUABC, making follow-up central to peer reviews and linking governance commitments to national budgets.
He also called for stronger protection for whistle-blowers, journalists, auditors, courts and civil society organisations, alongside greater use of open contracting, beneficial ownership registers, asset-declaration systems and cross-border asset recovery mechanisms.
Young Africans challenged
The intervention at SYPALA placed the responsibility for Africa’s governance future squarely before its emerging generation of leaders, professionals and policy thinkers.
Mr Senanu’s assessment concluded that the AU had built a substantial accountability architecture, but implementation remained uneven and its impact on citizens was still insufficient.
The presentation consequently challenged young Africans to shift the continental conversation from whether Africa has enough governance frameworks to whether those frameworks are actually changing citizens’ everyday experiences.
The next phase of African integration, it argued, must transform shared continental values into shared verification and, ultimately, visible consequences.
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