When the federal government announced on January 10 that the United States of America had returned a whopping $52.88 million to Nigeria from part of the recovered assets linked to a former Minister of Petroleum, Diezani Alison-Madueke, she successfully got into the league of Nigeria’s biggest looters and donors.
The disclosure which was made by the Attorney-General of the Federation and Minister of Justice, Lateef Fagbemi, during the formal signing ceremony of the asset agreement between Nigeria and the US in Abuja, generated a lot of buzz and a further step towards repatriating funds allegedly looted by the former minister despite her denying the crime.
Fagbemi had gone further to explain that $50 million of the assets recovered from Alison-Madueke would be deployed through the World Bank for the development of rural electrification projects, while the remaining $2 million would be used by the International Institute of Justice to expand the justice system and combat corruption.
This is not the first time Allison-Madueke will be in the eye of the storm over her alleged looting spree while she held sway as Petroleum Minister under the Goodluck Jonathan administration.
Former acting Chairman of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC), Ibrahim Magu, had once described loots recovered from her as humongous and “a tip of the iceberg.”
Magu had described the “gigantic loot” recovered from Alison-Madueke, as just the beginning, as many more discoveries would shock Nigerians.
“What we have recovered so far from Diezani is just the beginning. Its just a tip of the iceberg,” Magu had said while appearing on a television programme.
The then EFCC boss was commenting after N47.2 billion and $487.5 million in cash and properties was traced to the former oil minister by the anti-graft agency.
“This followed painstaking investigations by operatives of the EFCC. We are moving in and we will recover every loot linked to her. We will get other people she’s worked with,” Magu had said.
Another known Nigerian looter turned donor was the former Delta State governor, James Ibori, who drained the resources of the oil-rich Niger Delta State.
In 2021, the Nigerian government received the sum of £4.2 million from the British Government which was recovered from Ibori’s family members and associates.
Again in 2023, a London court ordered the confiscation of £101.5 million from Ibori which was allegedly laundered while he was Delta governor and rerouted into the UK with the help of close associates.
A news report in a British newspaper back then had noted that following his conviction in the UK on charges of money laundering and conspiracy to defraud the Nigerian state and its people, investigators found out that Ibori and his associates had run a sophisticated ring of siphoning stolen funds through a network of corporate structures which were splashed out on high-end London properties, luxury cars, and elite private schooling for his children in Britain.
Before his conviction, £17 million worth of Ibori’s assets were first frozen in 2007, but the confiscation process suffered a false start and then stalled due to successive appeals by Ibori that were finally exhausted in 2019.
“After more than a decade of delay, it’s hugely welcome to see this substantial confiscation order finalised in legal ink. But the long and tortuous road to reach this point shows just how tough it is to recover the proceeds of corruption in the UK.
“To ensure justice delayed doesn’t mean justice denied for the Nigerian people, it’s essential that the UK now makes every effort to ensure the speedy return of this stolen loot to benefit the victims of Ibori’s corruption in the Delta State,” the UK tabloid had written.
After signing the agreement with the UK government, the administration of former President Muhammadu Buhari, announced that the returned funds would not be going back to the Delta State coffers, where the money had originated.
While Nigerians have been celebrating the recovery and repatriation of their looted funds from Diezani Allison-Madueke, James Ibori and other low-key looters, the amounts recovered from them pale in significance to the monies that have been discovered and returned from former military dictator, the late Gen. Sani Abacha, since the advent of the fourth republic in 1999.
The late dictator ruled Nigeria as Head of State and Commander-in-Chief from 1993 to 1998 when he died, but in the five years he was in power, Abacha reportedly embezzled between $3 billion and $5 billion in public funds, placing him as one of the most corrupt leaders in history, not only in Africa but the world over.
Recapping Abacha’s loots is like a doctorate degree thesis as every year brings new discoveries from hitherto unknown hidden places and remote Islands in Switzerland, United Kingdom, the United States and Liechtenstein.
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In September 1999, a Swiss lawyer, Enrico Monfrini, who was hired by the Olusegun Obasanjo administration to track and recover the funds looted by Abacha, attempted to rewound a trail of the intricate method the kleptomaniac managed to take out so much money from the country’s coffers.
While narrating some of the methods to the BBC in an interview, Mofrini said one of the methods Abacha used for accumulating such a colossal sum was particularly brazen.
“Abacha would tell an adviser to make a request to him for money for a vague security issue,” the lawyer said.
“He then signed off the request which the adviser would then take to the central bank, which would hand out the money, often in cash. The adviser would then take most of that money to Abacha’s house. Some was even taken in dollar notes by the truck load.
“This was just one way Abacha and his associates stole huge amounts of money. Other methods ranged from awarding state contracts to friends at highly inflated prices and then pocketing the difference and demanding foreign companies pay huge kickbacks to operate in the country.”
This ingenious but devilish method of siphoning Nigeria’s money went on unabated for five years before the dictator died suddenly on June 8, 1998.
Armed with this privileged information, the Nigerian government went after the hidden money and in May 2020, the Nigerian government received the first $311 million of the Abacha’s loot from Jersey Island.
Nigerians were not also surprised when the National Crime Agency (NCA), announced on May 5, 2022, that it had recovered $23.4 million stolen from Nigeria by the associates and family of former military dictator General Sani Abacha.
Since then, it has become a yearly routine for Nigeria to receive funds from the Abacha loot running into billions of dollars which Nigerians have cheekily termed as donations from a benevolent ancestor.
In the last 25 years, the Nigerian government has been receiving steady huge funds looted and stashed in foreign countries by the late military dictator and an attempt at tabulating them would look like an academic exercise meant for economic scholars.
Under the regime of another military head of state, Gen. Abdulsalami Abubakar in 1999, over $750 million was recovered from the now infamous Abacha loot.
Under President Obasanjo, in April 2002, the Abacha family returned $1 billion to the federal government in a deal which involved the Swiss Federal Office of Justice, and according to Obasanjo in the second volume of his book, ‘My Watch’, by the time he left office in May 2007, over $2 billion and £100 million had been recovered from the Abacha family abroad, and N10 billion in cash and properties locally.
The Obasanjo administration also recovered $149 million from Jersey Island, in 2003, $500 million from Switzerland in 2004 and another $458 recovered in 2005 from Switzerland.
During the Jonathan administration, between 2010 and 2015, $1 billion was recovered in 2012, $380 million in 2015, with both tranches coming from Switzerland. In 2014, $227 million was recovered from Liechtenstein and $48 million from the United States the same year.
Under President Muhammadu Buhari, $322 million was recovered from Switzerland in 2017 and $311 million from Jersey Island in May 2020, the latest the Nigerian government has received.
In August 2022, the Buhari government signed a fresh agreement with the U.S. government for the return of over $23 million looted by Abacha.
Though successive administrations have outlined what they intended to do with the recovered funds, there have been fears that most of it have been relooted anyways.
In 2017, the then Buhari government said the $322m of the Abacha loot received from Switzerland has been distributed to poor Nigerians through the Social Investment Programme while the $311m received in 2020 would be used to complete the Lagos—Ibadan Expressway, Abuja—Kano Expressway, and Second Niger Bridge, but as it turned out, the funds were never fully utilized for the purpose as the Abuja-Kano Expressway, and the Lagos-Ibadan Expressway are still in a state of disrepair.
According to a Transparency International (TI) finding in 2006, when $723m was returned to Nigeria from Switzerland it was largely unaccounted for and this led Switzerland to attach conditions to the repatriation of another batch of $322 million in 2018, including third party oversight – meaning that the World Bank would monitor the distribution of the funds.
In response to a Freedom of Information (FoI) request sent to Buhari’s Attorney General of the Federation and Minister of Justice, Abukabar Malami (SAN), by the Socio-Economic Rights and Accountability Project (SERAP), the government said it has no record of the exact amount of public funds stolen by Abacha and no records of the spending by previous governments.
“We have searched our records and the information on the exact amount of public funds stolen by Abacha and how recovered loot was spent from 1999–2015 is not held by the Ministry,” Malami had responded.
The United States also warned Nigeria to be prepared for repayment if the latest repatriated fund was re-looted. The spokesperson for the US State Department, Morgan Ortagus, in a statement said this was part of the deal with the Nigerian authorities before the Island of Jersey where the funds were being kept, agreed to its repatriation.
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