Anti-Corruption and the Informant Phenomenon: The Harrowing Experiences of Whistle blowers in Nigeria

Abstract

The informant or whistle blowing concept has widely proven to be a practically useful mechanism in the fight against corruption in public and private sectors. Within the ambit of the whistle blowing framework, the disclosure of corrupt practices by employees of organisations is justifiable only on the grounds that the action is genuinely directed towards protecting the interest of the public.
Impliedly, therefore, besides its valuable attributes as an important anticorruption weapon and mechanism for incentivising the citizens, whistle blowing practitioners often go through diverse “harrowing experiences” for the actions they take in defence of public interest. The author of this paper uses some cases from Nigeria as examples to concretise this position and concludes that the informant practice, indeed, has dual distinct sides, especially in the absence of a well-articulated legal framework for protection of whistle blowers. The author advocates that the Nigerian government should expedite actions to enact a comprehensive whistle blowers’ protection law to guarantee adequate protection of informants, who risk their lives to expose acts of corruption in the
interest of society, from likely abuses. The study is a non-empirical and qualitative research that depends on the secondary method of data collection and the narrative analytical technique.