Refusing to trace CBEX funds is economic/security sabotage

FOR centuries through slavery and later colonialism, the world’s developed countries robbed Africa blind. And even now in the so-called post-independence era, the story remains the same.  In October 2023, participants at the 33rd Anti-Corruption Situation Room conference held in Abuja with support from the MacArthur Foundation urged African Heads of State to stop the theft of over $100bn, representing some 25 percent of Africa’s GDP, stolen every year from the continent by local and international collaborators. In his well argued piece published in the May 24, 2017 edition of Aljazeera titled Africa is not poor, we are stealing its wealth, Nick Dearden, director of the UK organization, Global Justice Now, noted that sub-Saharan Africa is a net creditor to the rest of the world by over $41bn. Although he acknowledges that Africa receives around $161bn a year in the form of loans, diaspora remittances and aid, he observes that there’s also $203bn leaving the continent. As he notes: “Some of this is direct, such as $68bn in mainly dodged taxes. Essentially multinational corporations “steal” much of this – legally – by pretending they are really generating their wealth in tax havens. These so-called “illicit financial flows” amount to around 6.1 percent of the continent’s entire gross domestic product (GDP) – or three times what Africa receives in aid. There are also more indirect means by which we pull wealth out of Africa. Today’s report estimates that $29bn a year is being stolen from Africa in illegal logging, fishing and trade in wildlife. $36bn is owed to Africa as a result of the damage that climate change will cause to their societies and economies.”

Given the CBEX sabotage that just hit Nigeria, it’s fair to ask what China knew of the fraud and when it knew it. Here’s why: following the outbreak of COVID-19 in Wuhan, as a United States Department of Homeland Security report found, the Chinese government deliberately concealed vital information from the international community while stockpiling medical supplies. It seized the pandemic as an unprecedented opportunity to shore up its international influence by providing the world with badly needed medical goods. Because Africa is a continent everyone wants to rob, Chinese “investors” typically enter into fraudulent and dirty agreements with subnational governments in Nigeria, stealing Nigeria’s money through the international legal system —the agreement with Ogun State that led to the seizure of Nigeria’s presidential jets is a good example—and so China’s neocolonial frauds make it a prime suspect in this CBEX case. If as it says it has no links to the CBEX fraudsters, then let it collaborate with the Nigerian authorities to track the funds. I am unable to picture any foreign power as a lover of Nigeria and Nigerians: all foreign powers are on our soil to see what they can loot; to steal, to kill and to destroy.

It is plain stupidity–no, criminal negligence– to see the CBEX billions stolen from Nigerians by fraudsters possibly working with certain governments as a question of people’s greed and then keep quiet as a government. Unless we are ruled by extremely dumb people, you just don’t keep quiet about that kind of heist, that humongous sum leaving your economy. In one of his books, Chief Obafemi Awolowo made a distinction between individual and national morality. As he argued, what is improper at an individual level may be proper at a national level because of national interest. For instance, states have been known to engage in acts such as assassinations because of their national interest. That being the case, it amounts to extreme stupidity to have an economy that Ponzi schemers can readily loot from, and to fail to go after the perpetrators and unmask their havens. Does anyone realize what $1bn can do to the Nigerian economy? How can the money be gone with the wind? Does anyone think that scammers can take such money out of the US economy, say, without any repercussions?

Serious governments, through underground operations, would go after those criminals and kill them little by little, soak them in acid where possible, or hang them very slowly. They would freeze and confiscate their assets.

Promising investors 100 percent returns on investment within 30 days, accepting only dollar-denominated transactions and offering referral bonuses to incentivize user growth, the CBEX scammers rode on the greed and gullibility of the Nigerian populace and the docility and complicity of the Nigerian government and scammed Nigerians of hundreds of millions of dollars. They had history as their insurance: MMM criminals had stolen some $50 million from Nigerians without repercussions in 2016. From 2018 to 2021, certain robbers using the platform MBA Forex had also stolen $500 million by promising high returns through forex trading. There were also Racksterli and Loom Money, not to mention various agricultural crowdfunding scams. Here’s the key point to note: Nigerians have lost over $1 billion to Ponzi schemes in the past decade.

Nigerians are of course not alone in the Ponzi tragedy. South Africa’s Reserve Bank investigated 222 Ponzi schemes between 2007 and 2019 after thousands of citizens had been fleeced. Between 2006-2007, 148,000 “investors” were robbed through 271 Ponzi schemes in Kenya, losing some $93 million. The operators of the ICC Services scheme, which collapsed in neighbouring Benin in 2010, stole about 5 per cent of the country’s GDP from an estimated 150,000 depositors. In Lesotho, some 100,000 investors lost over $42 million through the so-called MKM Burial Society. It is not known how much South Africans lost but when you take the $1 billion lost in Nigeria and add the figures for Benin ( $150 million), Kenya ($93 million) and Lesotho ($42 million) alone, you are looking at some $1.285 billion. Now, when governments adopt a laid-back attitude and refuse to trace this heist, then the future gets pregnant with further heists. Why not track the criminals through Interpol, using financial Intelligence and digital forensics and tracing the criminals to their havens?

In such an abundantly blessed but criminally managed country like Nigeria where the government does virtually nothing for the citizenry (a country where the so-called water corporations have not produced even a cup of potable water in decades), citizens cannot but fall prey to schemes which promise a level of comfort that the government will never give. It is therefore rather illiterate to keep harping on citizens’ greed while the government itself acts like a Ponzi scheme. From an economic and security standpoint, it amounts to sabotage for the government to deliberately refuse to trace this money, leaving its economy perpetually open to foreign economic terrorists and their local collaborators. After all, as the philosophers John Locke and Thomas Hobbes argued convincingly, it is the duty of the government to protect the people even from themselves.

No one but a saboteur plays ping-pong with saboteurs. Will the government prove, at least in this case, that we are not ruled by saboteurs?

READ ALSO: EFCC declares four persons wanted over CBEX scam