Selective Accountability: Anti-Corruption Institutions and Political Weaponisation in African Hybrid Regimes

Anti-corruption commissions in hybrid regimes are examined as institutions designed to signal accountability while preserving factional control over enforcement in Uganda, Kenya, and South Sudan. The study asks how selective accountability structures political order in the contemporary era of donor-backed anti-corruption institutionalism, combining insights from institutional economics, anti-corruption theory, and hybrid regime scholarship. Drawing on comparative institutional analysis of anti-corruption bodies, prosecution record reviews, interviews with oversight actors, and process tracing of prominent cases, the analysis shows that the phenomenon is not best understood as a discrete policy failure or episodic crisis. Rather, it is reproduced through linked institutional and political mechanisms that reshape incentives, authority, and access to resources over time. Across the cases, the study traces how these mechanisms operate in practice, the variation they generate, and why reform agendas that overlook underlying political settlements rarely succeed. It offers both a conceptual synthesis and a grounded comparative interpretation of selective accountability in hybrid regimes. The study concludes that durable reform requires more than formal institutional design, demanding political bargaining and accountability strategies capable of reaching the effective sites of power.