On Wednesday 24 May, an audience gathered at the Frontline Club for a discussion on corruption and its far-reaching implications. Sarah Chayes and Tom Burgis joined freelance journalist and host of Newshour on the BBC World Service, Owen Bennett-Jones, to talk about their experiences in Africa, Afghanistan and beyond. Chayes is an expert on kleptocracy, anti-corruption and civil-military relations, and is currently senior associate in the Democracy and Rule of Law Program and the South Asia Program at the Carnegie Endowment. Burgis is investigations correspondent at the Financial Times and has worked extensively in Africa.

L-r: Sarah Chayes, Owen Bennett-Jones and Tom Burgis

It has become increasingly clear that corruption exists at every level around the world. Yet there is an ongoing reluctance to understand its complexities and to commit to workable solutions.

Chayes said, “I think there is a bias against this topic … People’s eyes glaze over. It’s not a sexy topic. There is a tendency to dismiss the seriousness of the problem.”

Chayes did not study corruption in depth until she spent time in Kandahar, Afghanistan. Initially working as a journalist and for a number of NGOs, she devoted her time to helping to repair homes that had been damaged by heavy bombing. Chayes recounted how she could not obtain the materials needed, however, because the Governor would award himself stone and sell it at grossly inflated prices to the international military.

Once Chayes left Kandahar she began to realise the extent of endemic corruption, not just in Afghanistan but around the world. She said, “I came to understand that this isn’t a fraying around the edges kind of government system. This kind of corruption network is structured and organised.”

Burgis spoke about his experiences as a correspondent for the Financial Times in South and West Africa. Africa is often described as a paradox of plenty. While the continent is frequently viewed as a symbol of extreme poverty, it is in many regards one of the wealthiest places on earth in terms of its abundance of basic natural resources.

On the subject of corruption in Nigeria, Burgis said: “It happens because the currency gets distorted… It happens because ultimately if you’re a country whose economies depend on shipping out raw resources, the contract or the deal between the rulers and the ruled breaks.”

Corruption is not just a local issue – there are global implications at every level.

Bennett-Jones asked the panellists: “If you take these situations as you described, how much of it ends up at the top of the system in the City of London, Zurich and the banks in New York and therefore will never be resolved because they are just too powerful to deal with?”

Chayes responded: “The countries that are on the positive end on the Transparency International Corruption Perceptions Index are the ones that are exporting corruption services to the corrupt governments.”

Why is property market in London so inflated? A lot is fuelled by stolen overseas money. Tom Burgis His book Looting Machine #frontlineclub

— Kate Adams (@KateAdams3) June 24, 2015

Even though the extent of widespread corruption may seem impenetrable, Chayes believes that we can all play an individual role in combatting its influence.

“I have my money in HSBC. I intend to take my money out of HSBC. There’s a role for us as custodians of all of our values to play in piercing some of this hypocrisy.”

More information on The Looting Machine: Warlords, Tycoons, Smugglers and the Systematic Theft of Africa’s Wealth by Tom Burgis is available here.

Click here for more information on Thieves of State: Why Corruption Threatens Global Security by Sarah Chayes.

The Frontline Club was at full capacity on Wednesday 4 February, as a panel of experts discussed the implications of Boko Haram’s presence in West Africa in the lead up to the Nigerian presidential elections on 14 February.

L -R Peter Okwoche, Funmi Iyanda, Mike Smith, Bala Mohammed Liman and Alex Perry.

The panel included: Bala Mohammed Liman, a doctoral candidate at SOAS specialising in the intersection of conflict and identity in Nigeria; Funmi Iyanda, a Nigerian producer, journalist and talk show host; Mike Smith, a foreign correspondent with AFP and former West African bureau chief; and Alex Perry, a contributing editor at Newsweek‘s international edition and author of The Hunt for Boko Haram. The discussion was chaired by Nigerian journalist at the BBC Peter Okwoche  who, by way of an introduction, commented that the panel knew “Nigeria even better than me, which says a lot!”

The discussion began with Smith and Perry explaining why Boko Haram had reached such prominence under the current Presidential term, and the ways in which the Government was at fault for their failure to act.

Smith said: “This is absolutely a national issue now, maybe a regional issue. We don’t want to exaggerate though, Jonathan called it the ‘Al Qaeda of West Africa’, but it is absolutely not that.”

Perry said: “[Boko Haram] has reached the regional level [of importance] because Nigeria has allowed it to. We have to focus on the core issues: a total lack of governance and corruption that people are fed up with. It doesn’t legitimise Boko Haram, but you create a situation where some unrest becomes much more likely in these circumstances.”

Okwoche asked: “Should the buck stop with Goodluck Jonathan?”

Perry answered: “Nothing good that has happened in Nigeria has anything to do with him… look at the disinterest and indifference. It took 20 days for the Government to even notice the Chibok girls were missing. I mean, my God, 20 days to notice a whole school had gone… It was an unbelievable confirmation of the indifference and shows how out of touch the political elite are.”

He continued: “The government in Nigeria, it’s a very dark place, it does something very corrosive to notions of civic trust and culture of public good. If you think everyone in Nigeria is out for himself or herself, it makes you pretty frightened and cornered.

“You can’t trust people to tell the truth, truth evaporates and there is a darker motive behind everything… A solution to this is beginning to disappear, and that is really scary.”

A member of the audience commented on the group themselves: “We speak very little about the Boko Haram organisation itself. Maybe it is the Western media or my ignorance, but it seems like we know relatively little about the hierarchy of the group, the ability of the organisation.”

Smith responded: “My best definition of what we have now, is that Boko Haram…is just a good name to call all the things going on in the insurgency. Some of it may be different cells, or it may be one dominant cell – it gets quite complicated.”

“We have no idea how many members they may have because they recruit at will, and recruit both people who just need money or who are attracted to the ideology.”

Perry said: “This is local town rebels gone slightly, well totally, sociopathic. You can almost say what they are against, but saying what they are for is almost impossible because they are incredibly bad at articulating it.”

He continued: “I am not underestimating their brutality at all…. it has become a death cult. There is an awful lot of ceremony around the beheadings, there are readings from books, and everyone is arranged in a circle. How do you counter an idea when there’s not really an idea there to counter?”

A member of the audience asked how poverty affects Boko Haram’s level of recruitment, and asked the panel to comment on the impact of high unemployment and disillusionment amongst young people in this regard.

Okwoche interjected with a shocking statistic: “Within the age group of 19-25 in Nigeria, the unemployment rate is 40%. That completely blew my mind.”

Perry said: “In the North, I imagine that figure would be double. The marginalisation and exclusion and huge youth bulge could be a great resource, but if it is not tapped, if that energy isn’t re-directed, it’s a time bomb. Social exclusion is the bedrock with which Boko Haram is founded. There is no doubt about it, the area has some of the worst poverty statistics for anywhere in the world…it really is one of the worst places to live on earth. But there is no alternative, there are no jobs, and Boko Haram will pay you.”

The final questions focused on the future of Nigeria, and whether the current situation had a chance of improving in the near future. Iyanda answered with little optimism.

She said: “I keep thinking about this and I don’t like any of the answers. Either we get lucky, we get a good change of Government, or we get a change of heart or strategy from the same Government. Otherwise it would have to be that something really desperate happens. The Nigerian government and its sense of well-being would have to be threatened. I don’t know how that would happen… but I don’t want to find out.”

Watch and listen back below:

On Wednesday 1 October, several experts told a crowd at the Frontline Club about the unprecedented and horrific impact that the Ebola epidemic is having in West Africa.

The panel — moderated by Ade Daramy, chair and spokesperson for the UK Sierra Leone Ebola Task Force — tackled the international community’s response to the outbreak and assessed the situation on the ground during the Frontline Club’s First Wednesday: The Fight Against Ebola.

From left: Meinie Nicolai, Professor David Heymann, Ade Daramy, Colin Freeman, Dr Ike Anya and Dr Tim O’Dempsey in conversation at the Frontline Club. Photograph: Mackenzie Weinger

“This is an equal opportunity killer,” Daramy said.

In particular, the experts gathered at the Frontline Club’s discussion zeroed in on the damage the epidemic has inflicted on the health workforce.

Dr Tim O’Dempsey, who was seconded to WHO as clinical lead for the Ebola Treatment Centre in Kenema, Sierra Leone, this summer, told the packed house: “One of the things that probably isn’t on the radar at the moment in terms of the impact of Ebola is the impact on the health workforce and the loss of these very valued members of society.”

“Ebola,” he said, “has torn through the health infrastructure.”

And Meinie Nicolai — president of MSF Belgium and MSF’s operational directorate in Brussels, who recently returned from Liberia and Sierra Leone — called both the scale of MSF’s operations and the outbreak itself entirely “unprecedented”.

MSF is continually reinventing its Ebola response and has even done what they “never do”, which is to call for state actors to come in and get involved, she told the Frontline Club. “Throwing money is way too easy.”

The situation on the ground is absolutely devastating, she said. “People are dying at our front door”.

As for the media response, there have been few journalists on the ground covering this crisis, Colin Freeman, the chief foreign correspondent for the Sunday Telegraph, noted.

Freeman — who recently returned from West Africa and said his time on the ground offered “no shortage of dreadful horror stories” — put it down to the fears this particular virus has raised.

“Stories of this sort ring alarm bells in office health and safety managers because I’ve got to come home to the office and then go in and work in a building with 3,000 people. If I get a bullet wound, it doesn’t matter,” he said.

Still, the nature of Ebola does demand that a journalist do his or her job in a very different fashion, he added. “What you have to do is just make sure nobody comes too near to you, which is the opposite of what you normally do when you’re trying to report and get in people’s confidence,” Freeman said.

And Ebola isn’t slowing down.

“The frightening thing for everybody involved in this is the accelerated epidemic that we’ve seen occurring in Liberia,” O’Dempsey said. “That is likely to be mirrored with about a six-week lag in Sierra Leone.”

But there are areas that offer some hope, he said. “The survivors, I think, are going to be a great asset when it comes to the epidemic response.”

As the evening came to a close, Daramy took a moment to remind the crowd that, “Even in the midst of Ebola, people are making jokes.”

“In Sierra Leone, they don’t shake hands, they touch elbows — and they refer to it as ‘elbowla’,” he said, to laughter from the crowd. “And also, they’re saying in the last few days is that if you don’t want to get Ebola, it’s as easy as ABC, which is ‘Avoid Bodily Contact’. So, you know, people can still smile. They can still smile.”

Watch and listen again here: