General Buhari has become Nigeria’s president-elect on the premise of ‘change’ and a commitment to fight these processes and persons that help to deplete our purse. I cannot say that I envy him for choosing this type of slogan as the vehicle with which to attain power; and whether he would succeed or not depends on a lot of factors that would test his resolve to fight corruption.
By Bob Majiri Oghene Etemiku
Certain documents ascribable to a United Nations body indicate that more than $20billion have been stolen from developing countries and stashed in developed countries – mostly the UK, Switzerland, Luxemburg, Liechtenstein, Jersey and the Bahamas.
Of that amount, about $5billion have been taken from our public purse and taken abroad.
Some of the money is stashed locally as well. The methods are a complex web involving taking the money from source, separating the money from the source, and returning the monies into the economy as though they are legitimate funds.
These are monies that have no business being in certain hands that get into the hands of politically exposed persons – politicians, soldiers, businesspersons – illegally.
The experts who drew up that document say that because our institutions are weak, those monies easily get into the hands they get into and have to be legitimized.
Once they become legitimized, it takes nearly the same number of years and the complex processes to legitimize those illegally acquired funds to recover them.
Therefore, if the effort to recover those monies usually takes years to accomplish, it is an effort that needs the cooperation of the country where those monies were stolen from and where they are stashed.
General Buhari has become Nigeria’s president-elect on the premise of ‘change’ and a commitment to fight these processes and persons that help to deplete our purse.
I cannot say that I envy him for choosing this type of slogan as the vehicle with which to attain power; and whether he would succeed or not depends on a lot of factors that would test his resolve to fight corruption.
First of them is the allegation making the rounds that he rode on the back of corruption to attain to that position.
When he bought his party form, he paid a whopping sum of N27million. That for someone who was said to be clean and poor and didn’t help himself to public funds as Petroleum minister under Olusegun Obasanjo when there was an allegation that nearly $2billion went missing in the 70s is hard to sell.
But this is with respect to the fact that he was absolved of any kind of wrongdoing by a government panel set up to look into his role as petroleum minister.
I have debated this issue with his most ardent fans, many of whom have no answers to these weighty suppositions that that allegation brings up.
Some of these ardent fans of his have made it clear to me that as a former Head of State, it would not be difficult for him to muster that sum of money, especially when there are people around who support and believe in him.
This is a very valid apology but in civilized places where things are done properly, a list of donors and their identities can be accessed. But in his case, nobody knows where General Buhari got the N27million from.
Then there is this allegation that refuses to go away, that as Petroleum Trust Fund, PTF, Chairman there was a curious 10% allocation of all PTF funds to Sani Abacha, to the extent that a lot of these funds resemble some of the $5billion Abacha stashed away in five years to Liechtenstein and Switzerland.
It was only recently in February 2015, after the death of Sani Abacha in 1998, after all kinds of curious deals involving the Federal government and the Abacha family, that some of the monies are eventually going to be repatriated to Nigeria.
Now the question is this: is General Buhari going to respect all of those curious deals or he is going to go the hog and fight to hand the beneficiaries of these stolen funds nice prison terms?
How he intends to deal with this problem would be interesting particularly as he was a part of that administration that allegedly stole $5billion in five years.
But what intrigues me more about the direction that General Buhari’s fight against corruption would take is something other than these.
Some of the politically exposed persons who bankrolled his election are alleged to have laundered stolen monies. First is the leader of the All Progressive Congress, APC, Bola Tinubu, the Jagaban.
Even though he was arraigned over money laundering charges some time ago, he was never convicted.
But there is talk that he owns a quarter of Lagos and 90% of the tax accruable to Lagos state is controlled by a company that fronts for him.
Apart from the Jagaban, there is Senator Alhaji Bagudo, one of those alleged to have been the front for the siphoning of the monies that Abacha stole to Jersey and Luxemburg.
Together with a lot more politically exposed persons with income allegedly linked to stolen funds, or to funds derived illegally from the public purse, they put General Buhari on the private jets that jutted the length and breadth of Nigeria, lodged him in five-star hotels and put fuel in the vehicles that crisscrossed the Nigeria landscape in the build up to his campaign to be president.
I have tried to understand how a General Buhari is going to fight and recover stolen funds if he got to power with sponsorship from funds that are allegedly stolen or illegally derived.
I have read a lot of the letters, messages and agenda that have been set for the General. Some ask the General to give every Nigerian social security.
Others want uninterrupted electricity and yet others want him to tackle corruption. Some like Elsa Buchanan of the International Business Times, IBT, in the UK want him to deal with fake pastors in Nigeria.
Among all of these people none has told the General that as a democratically elected president, he doesn’t have the powers they arrogate to him.
General Buhari is no longer a military Head of State, and he is no longer 44. At 72 he looks wiser and poised to dash the hopes and aspirations of the millions who voted him to power.
He is saddled with the task of balancing three tiers of government and he is constrained to do things according to the rule of law.
This means that he cannot arbitrarily order the arrest and detention of corrupt persons. If he does that and freezes the accounts of the many thieves that have run government, he would have an army of lawyers to contend with.
Apparently he knows about this. In a meeting with his supporters recently after the March 28 presidential elections he said: “Though many expect that things will change in a day or weeks, it is not so; this is because it will take us years to amend changes. Nigerians are in haste; people should not see change that we are championing as a twinkle of an eye; we need prayers and patience for us to succeed.”
I know something of the temperament of the incoming president. He is a soldier, and like our former president Olusegun Obasanjo, he would love to clean Nigeria in 24 hours.
I wouldn’t recommend that to the General. Yet many have recommended that he immediately arrest those around him who used their ill-gotten wealth for his campaign.
I wouldn’t recommend that, again. What I would recommend to the General, as a matter of fact, is that first of all, he should not do what he did in the first place when he was military head of state: instead of wasting time pursuing allegedly corrupt persons, and working to hand them outrageous jail terms perhaps as deterrent, he should work to strengthen public accountability and transparency with public funds.
To do that he has to cooperate with key organizations in the developed world that are interested in working with Nigeria to monitor stolen assets recovered in their countries.
Our organization has strategic partnerships with many of these institutions which we have worked with over the years to promote good governance, respect for human rights, peace building and resource mobilization issues.
Bob Majiri Oghene Etemiku is communications manager, Africa Network for Environment and Economic Justice, ANEEJ. www.aneej.org.
