Horizontal Accountability

7. In order to have a better understanding of horizontal accountability, let us ask ourselves the following: who exercises horizontal accountability: – state agencies; where it is manifested by oversight, legislation, sanctions, impeachment.

8. In a young, emerging post conflict democracy, one of the litmus tests for good governance is the role being played by political parties, both in providing or subverting horizontal accountability. In a presidential system of government, a very important source of horizontal accountability is the separation of powers in which each branch of government, though constituted separately, exercises an important degree of horizontal accountability to the others. That is why a Parliament or National Assembly of a country is empowered to impeach and remove the President, while the judiciary has the power to declare laws passed by Parliament unconstitutional on the dictate of the fundamental law: the constitution.

9. However, majority parties in many countries including young, emerging and post-war democracies are capable of subverting the control implied by the separation of powers. Not only do they often control both legislative and the executive branches, but depending on the system of judicial nominations and the tenure of the party in office, they can extend their control on the judicial branch as well. When the party in question is highly disciplined and hierarchical, this amounts to an exclusive control of powers of government by a small group of party leaders – effectively, an elected oligarchy, which is no less than a form of tyranny and could be very dangerous to representative democracy. The recent past of Sierra Leonean democratic experiment is a case in point. When a President controls not only the executive, but also the legislative and eventually the judiciary as well, horizontal accountability is most likely to be weaker than when the legislature and judiciary are not controlled by him.

10. Without separation of powers, there is no balance of powers within government, and no alternative routes for the people to challenge representatives and administrators or to change or even enforce the rules by which all branches of government operate.

11. Another challenge to horizontal accountability which could threaten democracy comes from public institutions that have fallen under the control of private interests; which, in the case of legislature, would include the interests of politicians who pursue ends of a purely private nature the epitome of corruption and ends which favour the political “class” generally, and their own party specifically.

12. In some cases, the only interests many politicians appear to serve beyond their own are the private interests of business elites, both national and foreign which, of course, is not strange to this country’s history. That too is a perversion of horizontal accountability.

13. When Judges and other judicial personnel are widely perceived to serve a combination of their own private interests of those who corrupt them and in some cases the particular interests of those political parties with whom they are aligned or that guarantee them impunity.

14. The implication of all these corrupt practices and impunity is the revulsion in the minds of the majority of citizens that their interests are rarely, if ever, represented or defended. Where private interests are perceived to have hijacked these public institutions, democracy is fatally undermined, and the way is open for civil unrest.