Guinea's battle against corruption

Paul Collier writes in The Guardian: Across Africa democratically elected leaders are fighting against corruption in the natural resource sector. But by various means, corruption fights back. Those under investigation hire highly paid legal guns to sue and silence, and highly paid public relations gurus to twist and smear. Impecunious governments trying to impose the rule of law find it subverted into the rule of lawyers and trial by media.Nowhere is this struggle playing out more graphically than Guinea. The nation's first democratically elected president, the long-exiled democracy campaigner Alpha Condé, and his distinguished finance minister, Kerfalla Yansane, are struggling against an inheritance of systemic plunder. One such inheritance, highlighted both by the Financial Times and Global Witness, is the allegation that the world's most valuable iron ore deposits were handed over for a song, on the deathbed signature of a military dictator. The purchasers have defended the deal, but as the African telecoms billionaire Mo Ibrahim said in Dakar last weekend: "Are the Guineans who did that deal idiots, or criminals, or both?"...