Nigeria’s president has hit back after David Cameron labelled his country “fantastically corrupt”, denouncing western states for their poor record in returning looted funds to nations struggling to shake off kleptocracy.
In a speech in London yesterday ahead of a corruption summit today, Muhammadu Buhari made no direct mention of the British prime minister’s disparaging remarks, which were picked up by a nearby television camera as Cameron spoke to the Queen at a Buckingham Palace reception, the Financial Times reports.
But the 73-year-old former military ruler, who won last year’s elections on a pledge to clean up pervasive corruption in Africa’s biggest economy, stressed the problem was not the sole preserve of poor countries. “Corruption is a hydra-headed monster,” said Buhari, who has been grappling with a vast system of patronage and theft, fuelled by revenues from the continent’s biggest oil industry. “It does not differentiate between developed and developing countries.”
Buhari, billed by summit organisers as a star turn, called for the establishment of “international anti- corruption infrastructure” that could trace looted money and return it “without delay or precondition”.
He thanked the US and Switzerland for working to return more than $600m stolen by the late dictator Sani Abacha.
But he complained that “our experience has been that repatriation of corrupt proceeds is very tedious, time-consuming and costly”.
The Nigerian government has been at pains to reassure the Swiss authorities and World Bank officials who have a mandate to oversee the repatriation of those funds that they will not simply seep out of government coffers once again.
Asked later by Sky News, Buhari acknowledged that Nigeria was corrupt and said he would not be asking Cameron for an apology.
His call for international co-operation appears to echo in part, the British prime minister’s plans to establish an anti-corruption information-sharing agency based in London. Details of the agencyare expected to be announced at the summit.
Buhari said his government was working to trace “billions of dollars” siphoned into local and international banks. His comments highlight concerns among reform- minded leaders of countries whose revenues have long bled away through embezzlement and corruption.
One top corruption investigator estimates the wealth marooned in the financial system by the death and overthrow of kleptocrats runs at least into tens of billions of dollars – sums that dwarf the budgets of many of the countries from which the money was looted. The pot is thought to have grown in recent years with revolutions in eastern Europe and then the Arab uprising.
A series of scandals has shone a light on the west’s role as a conduit for ill-gotten wealth. The UK’s National Crime Agency estimates hundreds of billions of dollars of criminal money pass through British banks each year.
Buhari appeared frustrated in his speech. “The system is so tolerant of corruption in Nigeria that I see [corrupt officials] riding [in a] Rolls-Royce but they are innocent until proven guilty.”
Many Nigerians seem willing to accept that reform, if it comes, will be slow. “The system is completely broken,” said Erifeoluwa Olurin, a university student in Lagos. “He cannot fix it overnight.”
FT
