Abacha loot: matters arising

Abacha loot. I thought it was a buzz phrase intended to break the tradition of not speaking ill of the dead. Apparently not. The late General Sani Abacha had fingers that permanently itched him and appeared to be soothed only when he ran those fingers over mint foreign and local currencies.

At Newswatch magazine, we were once privileged to be given a scoop on an Abacha loot. The security men had come upon an unbelievable heap of dollars – $700 million – in the guest house of one of Abacha’s sons in Abuja. The story, surprisingly, did not quite excite the public as much as we had hoped it would. The reaction was something like, so what? Our readers probably thought there was nothing particularly unusual in such a stack of dollars in cash owned by a man who once knew where the CBN vaults were.

The love of money drove Abacha, as it often does all those with a similar bent, down the garden path of shame. Were this to be the time shame mattered to individuals and their families, the fact that he seemed to have looted the treasury he was supposed to guard in our collective interest would have driven his family crazy. I suspect the general did not heed the warning by the good book that the love of money is the root of all evil. Now, see where it led him.

Since our return to civil rule in 1999, Nigerian, European and American sleuths and authorities have been preoccupied with recovering the Abacha loot wherever it could be found. Following the trail in European and United States banks led them through the labyrinth of foreign laws and banking regulations, to an expose of Abacha’s love for money. As you can see, the times have really changed. Banking secrecy is giving way to the exposure of men and women from developing countries who enriched themselves at the expense of their own people. There is no safe bank vaults for them and their loot any more. Not even in Switzerland, whose banks were for years famously bound by the law to see evil but speak no evil.

Only this past week, February 3, Nigerian and US officials signed an agreement for the repatriation of $308 million Abacha loot. It is the sign of the changing times in public morality and the global struggle to tame the wild horse called corruption, that the governments of countries whose banks took in the lodgments and tried to hide them from the prying eyes of the sleuths, have been helping the Nigerian government to return the loot home. Abacha loot is a sad commentary on the presumed incorruptibility of the khaki. Avarice is no respecter of uniforms, apparently.

What intrigues me about the Abacha loot is its source. No one has told us how the late general looted the country by turning his love of money into such a destructive obsession. How, I keep wondering, did one man steal so much money from the country and no one raised alarm at the time? Did he steal it from the public treasury being, perhaps, the proceeds of padding government contracts? Did he steal it outside the normal channel of public expenditure? Was it possible for him to either raid the Central Bank at intervals or did the money flow into his private coffers from say, the diversion of crude oil sales?

I know these questions would never be answered, not only because the general could no longer be put through the grill in the hands of EFCC investigators, but because no one has tried to search for his collaborators who should have told us, even in snatches of remembrance, what role they played in helping the general loot so much. All treasury looters have collaborators because none of them could do it alone. In Abacha’s case, time and circumstance are now protective of his former co-conspirators. The trail has gone cold – and will remain cold and continue to oil our ignorance about how those who ruled or rule us did and do the unthinkable.

I thought knowing this would be fundamental to the successful prosecution of the anti-graft war. It is not enough to concentrate on what was stolen. We should also know how it was stolen and who, besides the accused former public officers participated in facilitating it. I think it bears repeating, to wit: no one ever tangoes alone. It takes two or more to do so.

My take is that if the authorities look closely enough, they might find some gaping loop holes in our public financial system so easily exploited by some of our public officers. Blocking those holes, if they exist and I believe they do, would be part of the preventive measures against treasury looting. Indeed, if in the face of the anti-graft war, the camels are still leisurely sauntering through the eye of the needle, it can only mean that the tribes of Abacha pikins are growing and waxing strong. I am worried that from what I hear and see, treasury looting in various guises has almost become the norm, rather than the exception.

From the Obasanjo administration to Buhari’s, it seems that Abacha’s private vault must be virtually empty now. So much has been recovered from it from various countries. But we, the people, who were cheated by his looting spree, do not know how much has been returned to the public treasury and what was done with it. It is important for the federal government to be open about this. Transparency is not harmful.

Presidential spokesman, Garba Shehu, has told us that the $308 million would be used by the Nigerian Independent Sovereign Authority for “infrastructure projects in strategic economic zones” in the country. Sounds familiar? Yes. But just to make sure that the recovered loot is not looted, the Americans, in the agreement insisted on mechanisms and external oversight for monitoring how the money is used. The Americans were not joking when they warned that if the recovered Abacha loot is looted again, Nigeria would repay it.

I have a cold feeling they probably know something about the fate of the Abacha loot recovered previously. The shroud of opacity must be removed now from the face of transparency in handling the Abacha loot. The people have the right to know how much of what was stolen from them by Abacha and other former public officers accused of treasury looting has been returned to the public treasury and how it was used or being used to better their lot and our social and economic development.