Anti-Corruption Organization (AC) is an international NGO under French law founded in 2005. It is set to bring innovation to the anti-corruption arena by establishing Anti-Corruption Law Enforcement, by involving the people in the anti-corruption fight and by tackling corruption within development projects. Anti-Corruption Cameroon became operational on March 08.
LAGA , AC And The Fight Against Corruption
As activists we try to do what we can to tackle corruption issues as an NGO and prove Civil Society Organizations can and should develop a much more demanding and aggressive approach in this fight.
Our first NGO, LAGA took a decade-long baseline of zero prosecutions under the existing wildlife law – a shocking baseline shared with almost all Central and western African countries with sharp contrast to the amount of public funds poured into conservation – as a symptom of failure of the aid business, and its inability to tackle the first obstacle to development – corruption.
LAGA was an experiment field for methods of fighting corruption within a law enforcement and application process. Bribing attempts are documented in 85% of our field arrest operations, and 80% of all court cases within the legal system. But LAGA is not an observer of corruption, it was created to fight corruption, redirecting the pressures existing within the political system, usually wasted in large conference halls and its useless political pledges of political will, to specific corruption attempts and the field realities that form corruption.
The project is considered to have moved Cameroon from the decade long zero wildlife prosecution to a one per week rate of a major wildlife dealer arrested and prosecuted, and achieved legitimacy for an NGO to fight corruption within a governmental process.
In its structure LAGA also tried to address the issue of the illusion of civil society in Africa – civil society organizations are not distinct from the state or its elite, but rather serve as to divert public funds for personal gain by the same elite.
The second NGO, AC – Cameroon, is trying to use the experience of establishing Wildlife Law Enforcement to push for Anti-Corruption Law Enforcement. In our first pilot project – “Fighting Corruption through Citizen Legal Action” we try to group ordinary victims of corruption acts and lead them to attack officials in court, then fight corruption within the legal process achieving a prosecution of an official both on civil as well as penal charges. The idea of this pilot project is empowerment of ordinary citizens to fight corruption.