Part 1           

Corruption has become the canker of the African body politic: malignant and pervasive. It has been nurtured by the system of state controls and an elite grab mentality. Prevailing intellectual environment characterized by brutal repression, censorship and state control of the media, does not permit an exposure of the problem. The crooks are seldom caught and the law can hardly be enforced when the chief culprit is often the head of state himself. George Ayittey defines corruption, its effects and how to fight it. Please note that this article will be run in three parts. Part 2 and 3 will be featured in issue 59 and 60 respectively of The African Executive.

Corruption is certainly not a social vice unique to Africa alone. It prevails in one form or another in practically all countries, Western and communist alike. Over the post-colonial period, the African state has evolved into a predatory monster or a gangster state that uses a convoluted system of regulations and controls to pillage and rob the productive class -- the peasantry. Heads of state, ministers, and highly placed African government officials raid the African treasury, misuse their positions in government to extort commissions on foreign loan contracts, skim foreign aid, inflate contracts to cronies for kickbacks and deposit the loot in overseas banks. The very people who are supposed to defend and protect the peasants interests are themselves engaged in institutionalized looting.

Dishonesty, thievery, and peculation pervade the public sector in Africa. Public servants embezzle state funds; high-ranking ministers are on the take. As Nigerian journalist, Tony Nze Njoku, noted: “Leadership in Africa, with few exceptions, is seen as an opportunity to get rich rather than serve the people.” The extent and magnitude of this scourge is difficult to estimate, owing to its illegality and the painstaking efforts the culprits make to conceal it. However, in August 2004, an African Union report claimed that Africa loses an estimated $148 billion annually to corrupt practices, a figure which represents 25 percent of the continent's Gross Domestic Product (GDP). 

At the Commonwealth Summit in Abuja, Nigeria on December 3, 2003, former British secretary of state for international development, Rt. Hon Lynda Chalker, revealed that 40 per cent of wealth created in Africa is invested outside the continent. Chalker said African economies would have fared better if the wealth created on the continent were retained within. "If you can get your kith and kin to bring the funds back and have it invested in infrastructure, the economies of African countries would be much better than what there are today, she said. And the loot is not small change. Speaking to representatives of African civic groups meeting in the Ethiopian capital, Addis Ababa, to prepare the African Union to be launched in South Africa, Nigeria’s President, Olusegun Obasanjo, said that “corrupt African leaders have stolen at least $140 billion (£95 billion) from their people in the decades since independence.” But that is small change compared to the $412 billion Nigerian rulers have stolen.

Nigeria: Looting With Impunity

Nigeria is a truculent African tragedy. With immense mineral wealth, it was poised to become Africa's answer to South Korea. But kamikaze plunder by military bandits reduced the “giant of Africa” to a comatose midget. The discovery and exploration of oil fields in the early 1970s led to a booming economy with oil accounting for more than 90 percent of exports and providing the federal government with 80 percent of its revenue. As money flowed into Nigerian government coffers, military dictators went on a spending spree. They frittered away the oil bonanza on extravagant investment projects, a new capital at Abuja with a price tag of $25 billion, and highly ambitious Third Development Plans, upon the false projections of oil output and revenue. Agriculture was neglected and food imports rose rapidly.

The supreme irony of Nigeria’s economic development is that, despite the flow of substantial oil wealth, the country entered the new millennium with real income per capita of about $260 today, which is nearly the same as it was at independence in 1960 and saddled with a foreign debt of $30 billion. About 60 percent of Nigeria’s population live on less than a $1 a day. The drop was more dramatic in the 1980s. In 1980, income per capita stood at $1029—the fifth highest in Sub-Saharan Africa. By 1990, it had dropped to a woeful $266. This sharp decline in economic performance was not due to external economic adversities but to grotesque mismanagement and brazen, unprincipled looting. 

Corruption has become so pervasive that navigating the most basic government services, such as getting freight through customs, often requires a bribe in Nigeria. Pay police officers -- many armed with automatic rifles -- set up impromptu roadblocks to shake down motorists.  Politicians take bribes and give them, including payments to reporters who can make more money from those they cover than from their meager newspaper paychecks.

Most Nigerians trace the root of corruption to military governments that ruled Nigeria before Obasanjo's election in 1999. The treasury became a personal bank account for a succession of generals. The rot oozed down to lawmakers, governors and judges. Civil servants, who in some cases went months or years without receiving their salaries, collected what they could by selling their services.

Between 1970 and the early 2004, more than $450 billion in oil money flowed into Nigerian government coffers, which simply vanished into private pockets. Nigerians are now asking what happened to the "oil money." The situation deteriorated so rapidly that Nigeria often ranks as the most corrupt nation and the scam capital of the world. According to Chief Eke Urum-Eke, an ex-major of the Biafran war and exiled in New York, "The only two flourishing business in Nigeria today are the business of government and the business of smuggling.” 

Following Abacha’s timely and mysterious death in June 1998, elections were held by his successor, General Abdulsalam Abubakar. Upon assuming power on May 29, 1999, President Obasanjo found the country ungovernable. A near government paralysis resulted from wrangling over distribution of power between the executive and the legislative. For 18 months (Feb 1999 to August 2000), Nigeria’s 109 senators and 360 representatives passed just five pieces of legislation, including a budget that was held up for five months. Immediately upon taking office, the legislators voted for themselves hefty allowances, including a 5 billion naira ($50 million) furniture allowances for their official residences and offices.

The impeached ex-chairman of the Senate from President Obasanjo’s own People’s Democratic Party (PDP), Chuba Okadigbo, was the most predatory: According to a report in the New African, as Senate President, he controlled 24 official vehicles but ordered 8 more at a cost of $290,000. He  spent $225,000 on garden furniture for his government house, $340,000 on furniture for the house itself ($120,000 over the authorized budget); bought without authority a massive electricity generator whose price he had inflated to $135,000; and accepted a secret payment of $208,000 from public funds, whose purpose included the purchase of `Christmas gifts”.

Looters Go Scot-Free

More than $1.3 billion of Abacha’s loot was believed to have been siphoned through London banks; one popular British bank alone was reported to have handled more than $170 million. The Abacha family and associates argued that they had an immunity deal from General Abdulsalam Abubakr's transitional regime that briefly ruled Nigeria after Abacha's sudden death before Obasanjo came to power. They said General Abubakr's government had agreed that if they returned “some money” (and they duly returned $750 million), they would be given immunity from criminal prosecutions. In May 1999, General Abubakr's regime acknowledged that some money had been returned. Since then, more Abacha-associated accounts have been discovered in 19 Western banks, but the Abacha family still insists that the deal with General Abubakr's government must stand. They have subsequently gone to court in Britain to stop the British government from handing over the results of its investigation into the morney to the Nigerian and Swiss authorities.      

Upon assuming office, President Obasanjo vowed to recover the loot of former head of state, General Abacha. He established the Corruption Practices and Other Related Offences Commission. Much public fanfare was made of the sum of about $709 million and another ₤144 million recovered from the Abachas and his henchmen. But, alas, this recovered loot itself was quickly re-looted. The Senate Public Accounts Committee found only $6.8 million and ₤2.8 million of the recovered booty in the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN). According to David Blair of London Telegraph, Nigeria's past rulers stole or misused £220 billion ($412 billion). That is as much as all the western aid given to Africa in almost four decades and equivalent to 300 years of British aid for the continent.   Consequently, two thirds of the country's 130 million people - one in seven of the total African population - live in abject poverty, a third is illiterate and 40 per cent have no safe water supply.  

Some Nigerian diplomats are not immune. By January 2003, the Permanent Mission of Nigeria to the United Nations, located in New York, had become a nightmare of unpaid bills and constant harassment from landlords, credit card companies, phone companies as well as other utilities. Nigerian diplomats could not be reached by phone because the lines had been cut. Even electricity to the giant building was also disconnected some time ago.

Increasingly, Nigeria has fast gained an unenviable reputation for financial mismanagement and scams. In fact, on January 13, 2003, the IMF warned West African countries against having one currency if Nigeria was to be included. The Fund believes that these countries would lose the value of their respective currencies if Nigeria was allowed to become a member because of high corruption and the specter of financial scam practitioners in the country, estimated to have defrauded foreigners of more than $2.2 billion.

Africa’s case for more aid and debt relief has not been helped by President Olusegun Obasanjo of Nigeria. As he was pleading for more aid at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, four of his state governors were being probed by London police for money laundering. The most galling was the case of Plateau State Governor, Chief Joshua Dariye, accused of diverting N1.1 billion (over $90 million) into his private bank accounts.

Dragged to the Federal High Court in Kaduna by Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC), Justice Abdullahi Liman ruled on December 16 that although Dariye was a principal actor in the case, Section 308 of the Nigerian Constitution protected sitting governors from criminal prosecution. Imagine. And would the police apprehend him if he had no such “constitutional immunity?” Nigeria's police chief himself, Inspector General Tafa Balogun, was forced into early retirement after investigators probing money-laundering allegations found $52 million hidden in a network of 15 bank accounts after being on the job for only two years. He was eventually prosecuted and sentenced to a mere six-month jail term – a slap on the wrist. Lawmakers have mocked attempts by the police to investigate MPs for corruption.

Nigeria’s Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC), has overwhelming evidence on most of the alleged corrupt government officials -- especially state governors. In fact, an allegation of corruption has been leveled against President Olusegun Obasanjo himself by the governor of Abia State, Orji Uzor Kalu.

Many Nigerians scoff at Obasanjo's anti-corruption campaign as an elaborate form of public relations to win concessions from lenders and burnish the president's reputation as a world leader. Critics note that only now, six years after Obasanjo first won office promising to crack down on corruption, are any major figures being brought to justice, and few have gone to jail. One such figure, General Ibrahim Babangida, an ex-military dictator, thumbs his nose at his people by even refusing to testify before the anti-corruption commission. When caught, punishment amounts to a mere sacking.  

When the nation's education minister, Fabian Osuji, was caught giving $400,000 to Nigerian lawmakers for favorable votes, he formally protested that such behavior was "common knowledge and practice at all levels of government." Besides, Osuji added, he had struck a good deal; the lawmakers had asked for twice as much. He was fired from the government. Besides Osuji, a succession of senior government figures -- including the top police official, the housing minister and the Senate president -- also have been pushed from their jobs and threatened with jail for offenses that once would have earned them little more than a wink. But political opponents contend that the president's election victories in 1999 and 2003 were so brazenly rigged that he lacks the moral authority to attack corruption.

Efforts to stem corruption began making headlines in August 2003 when Nasir Ahmad el-Rufa'i, who had just been named to a ministerial post overseeing the capital region, announced that two senators had asked him for bribes to facilitate his confirmation. El-Rufa'i estimated that at least three out of every four lawmakers are corrupt, as are more than half of the nation's governors and many of its civil servants. "If a few more ministers go to jail, if a few more members of the National Assembly go to jail, believe me, people will line up and do the right thing" el-Rufa'i said.