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Africa has often been dismissed as a lost cause. Our mockers never acknowledge that a great deal of our predicament lies in the fact that our heritage has been stolen. According to the UN, a trillion dollars of looted funds from Africa are lodged in Euro-American banks and various investment outlets. The EU estimates that such looted funds exceed 50% of the continent’s total external debts. According to James Henry, former McKinsey Chief Economist, over US$6 trillion from low-income countries have been illegally stashed away in foreign coffers; thefts that have been estimated to be ten times the annual package of development assistance that Africa receives.

Writing in the March 2010 issue of the African Development Review, ADB economists Hippolyte Fofack and Léonce Ndikumana suggest that Nigeria alone may have lost as much as US$248 billion to such financial haemorrhage. Over the last four decades, we have earned an estimated US$450 billion from petroleum exports, much of it having been frittered away, according to the late Pius Okigbo, in projects of doubtful value. Foreign and local contractors have often connived with politicians and bureaucrats in squirreling away funds meant for capital projects. Kickbacks are the norm. Outgoing Revenue Commission Chairman Engineer Hamman Tukur also recently lamented the fact that only the oil majors know precisely how much they have been stealing from our country. We are familiar with the over-invoicing and other accounting shenanigans that multinational firms have deployed for decades. It’s a very murky business.

Astonishingly, someone once attempted to convince the Federal Government to make all statutory transfers to state governments in dollars. Why waste their time paying them in naira, when American dollars are easier to launder abroad? And come to think of it, most of our state and local governments have never indicated what they planned to do with the windfalls from the Excess Crude Account. Over the past year alone, that account has been depleted from US$18 billion to the current pathetic US$3.5 billion. Nobody is being held to account for how these funds are being used. Nigerians would be forgiven for believing that a good part of these funds have already developed wings and flown in the direction of the whoredoms of Dubai and Lebanon.

Yesterday I had a one-on-one with a brother who was visiting from the United States, distinguished Professor Horace Campbell of Syracuse University, New York. He was anxious to prove to me that the stature of a national currency does not derive merely from so-called ‘economic fundamentals’, but from politico-military capability. He gave the example of the United States, where the supremacy of the dollar as the world’s reserve currency is largely a factor of American hegemony more than anything else. Considering the current Greek tragedy, he believes the dollar will triumph over the Euro because Eurozone countries do not have what it takes.

It is becoming increasingly clear to me that a poor country is not one where the people cannot afford the internationally defined minimum of US$2 per day. Rather, it is one where the elite have no confidence in keeping their assets in it; where local and foreign entrepreneurs cream off whatever surplus they can, leaving nothing behind. As a consequence, capital accumulation is non-existent, feeding the permanent syndrome that development economists have often described as ‘the vicious cycle of poverty’.

How can we break from this vicious cycle? The answer lies, in my humble opinion, in finding a credible mechanism by which looted funds could be freely repatriated. Legal prosecution on its own might prove to be a nightmare, given that a good part of the funds are tied up in blind trusts and complex securitized assets. The actuarial reality is that most of those who have committed rapine against our people might not be around in the next 30 years. As happened to Mobutu of Zaire, we may lose the funds and not even their children may have access to them.

Politics, as they say, is the art of the possible. At the end of the day, public policy often has to settle for second-best outcomes. One of such would be the declaration of a one-year amnesty on all looted funds, backed by effective legislation that guarantees that no questions shall be asked now or in the future. After the one-year amnesty has elapsed, government would then launch a massive campaign to recover all looted funds, within the framework of a comprehensive programme of restoration of stolen assets.

From current trends, we are not likely to meet most of the Millennium Development Goals by 2015, due to the yawning financing gaps that exist in certain crucial sectors. Our ambitious Vision 2020 project also requires massive investments in the infrastructure and power sectors. Our economy could do with a massive infusion of capital. The repatriation of stolen funds would bring a new lease of life to our economy while restoring our collective self-confidence in our country and its destiny.