On havens for slush funds

PRESIDENT Muhammadu Buhari’s charge to the international community, the other day, to strengthen mechanisms for dismantling havens for proceeds of corruption is a good statement that appropriately advertises the receiving countries of illicit fund flows as equally promoters of corruption.

Indeed, there is no denying the saying that a recipient of stolen items is as guilty as the thief. Besides, it is doubly tragic that these recipient countries set all manner of conditions for the recovery of looted funds and no amount of campaign or plea by the leadership of the suffering millions of citizens from where the funds were stolen ever worked. So, the true friends of Nigeria should go beyond rhetorics, stop receiving proceeds of corruption in their banks and even help recover the stolen funds already in their custody.

Certainly, much would always depend on how leakages are plugged by individual originating countries or as transit points but it is desirable that receiving countries share in the blame and have a sense of shame. Thankfully, many of the receiver-countries, mostly in the western world, are coming to terms with the fact that uncontrolled movement of slush funds is at the heart of heightening global tension and terrorism, and hopefully, the menace would stop.

Buhari, in reaffirming his administration’s resolve to frontally confront the twin evils of corruption and illicit financial outflows, had urged his counterparts all over the world to do more to return stolen funds and assets to their countries of origin. Of course, he was only restating the obvious in his observation that corruption, cross-border financial and cyber crimes and human trafficking are major challenges of the 21st century that ought to be jointly tackled by the international community. His statement also rightly pointed at those factors as impediments to development, economic growth and realisation of the wellbeing of citizens.

More reassuring, however, is his own readiness to partner with international agencies and other individual countries on bilateral terms to fight the scourge. However, returning the loot carted away by corrupt officials should be the priority while efforts are intensified towards sanitizing the system and discouraging corruptive tendencies among the people, especially those in government.

In underscoring the unsavoury role of the culpable receiver-nations in accepting and refusing to release loot even when the case had been established by originating countries, it is logical to deduce that they, in the first place, engender the poverty ravaging the developing world and are still undermining the people.

Nigeria inclusive, the originating countries are wrong to have allowed the outflows at all, and perpetration of the evil by successive leaders of government puts a question mark on the quality of leadership in the victim countries. Indeed, this is the crux of the matter: poverty of leadership. Painfully, the leaders successively strive to out-perform each other as treasury looters. A tiny percentage of the population in positions of authority (and their cronies) and some with access to the commonwealth who pillage public funds with impunity end up enslaving the majority.

Is it not rather baffling that despite the array of criminal laws in the statute books, big-time looters always find their way out of legal clasps, when they are ever prosecuted at all. What message is being sent to the potentially corrupt when identified corruption is not even sanctioned? And the Judiciary as a key component of government has not been too helpful to Nigeria in the matter of corruption litigations. Lawyers are known to go for all manner of injunctions to scuttle cases in favour of their corrupt clients to the detriment of professionalism and the conduct of a few judges have been questionable. That, indeed, may have prompted President Buhari to appeal to the conscience of members of the Bar and the Bench the other day when he opened the last Nigerian Bar Association Conference.

However, in spite of Buhari’s signals of his desire to get the citizens to do the right things, no one should be deluded that compliance will be immediate. In spite of policies and statements of intent, innate greed will keep pushing some to be corrupt. But appropriate institutions should be built to forestall and to punish in cases of breach.

Certainly, integrity has become a scarce commodity in the country generally and a long-drawn battle should be expected because the decadence is massive and those who want to steal and stash away will not relent. The song, however, is that there should be no comfort for them at home and no haven for their loot abroad.