Abacha loot: When the music grates in the ears

Poor General Sani Abacha. He is in the news again. One word, loot, now sadly defines his place in our national history. The word describes his alleged egregious injury to our national treasury. The recovery of his alleged loot from overseas banks excites public interest like no other. The latest news on his loot came from France last week.

France will return $150 million of his loot to our treasury. President Bola Tinubu is mighty pleased with the news, as indeed it should.

The Abacha loot, for all its public excitement, remains a mystery to most of us. The late head of state is regarded as the worst among the comity of our looters. It is unwise to defend Abacha, I am not competent to do so, but I am competent to suggest that the truth should be told.

Worse things have happened to our national and sub-national treasuries since death took him out of the scene in 1998. Some of those who came after him did worse and are doing worse much more than he did.

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None of them has been called to account; none of them is being called to account. Their sight frightens the law. The taciturn general would not today qualify as a member of the current big league of looters. He would be relegated as their boy-boy. Looting has become less crude than Abacha’s time. It is now more scientific, more sophisticated, and even more brazen. No one fears EFCC because the commission is now treated as a rite of passage for the looters on their way to a respectable society.

The pursuit and the recovery of the Abacha loot became and remains an obsession with every federal administration. Because Abacha is dead. Were he alive, none would have dared to talk of his loot. EFCC would have kept its distance from his doors. It is easy to make an example of the dead but impossible to make an example of the living. In my column of February 7, 2020, titled The Abacha loot: matters arising, I wrote:

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. It has been found in European and United States banks. Only this past week, February 3, 2020, Nigerian and US officials signed an agreement for the repatriation of $308 million Abacha loot. It is a 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 loot and tried to hide them, have been helping the Nigerian government to return the loot.

What is intriguing about the Abacha loot is its opaque source. No one has ever told us how the late general looted the country. How 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? Did he steal it outside the normal channel of public expenditure? Was it possible for him to 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 will never be answered, not only because the general could no longer be put through the grill 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 deny us the right to know the truth about the Abacha loot.

Why has no Nigerian government carried out local investigation into the Abacha loot? Did he not save any of the money in our local banks? 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 and stashed abroad. We should also know how it was stolen and who and who were involved in the looting.

If the authorities look closely enough, they might find some gaping loopholes 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. In the face of the anti-graft war, the camels are still leisurely sauntering through the eye of the needle – evidence that more looters are enjoying immunity from prosecution because the system has granted them the right to act with impunity. From what we 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 by 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, told us at the time that the $308 million from the US in 2020 would be used by the Nigerian Independent Sovereign Authority for “infrastructure projects in strategic economic zones” in the country. Sounds familiar? Yes. Seen anything of that? No. But just to make sure that the recovered loot is not re-looted, the Americans insisted in the agreement that some mechanisms and external oversight for monitoring how the money is used be instituted. The Americans warned that if the recovered Abacha loot is looted again, Nigeria would repay it.

They most probably knew something about the fate of the Abacha loot recovered previously. We can see nothing because of the veil of opacity that shrouds it. The obsession with the Abacha loot is beginning to look like flogging the dead because it is safer than calling the living to account. I know of no foreign country that has returned money stashed in their banks by living looters to the country because it was deemed to be the proceed of naked theft or naked graft. It even seems that what was recovered from the former head of state and from others who answered the call of EFCC has been re-looted. The new EFCC chairman, Olanipekun Olukoyede, was quoted shortly on assumption of office as having said that more than two trillion Naira were diverted from the custody of the commission under the watch of the immediate past federal administration. Talk of looting in a vicious circle.