POLITICS-NIGERIA: Govt Secures Deal on Looted Money

By Toye Olori Reprint | | Print |

Toye Olori

LAGOS, Apr 22 2002 (IPS) - The Nigerian government is planning to let off members of the late military ruler Sani Abacha’s family, who are facing trial, for the return of 80 percent of money that Abacha looted from government treasury and stashed in Swiss banks.

Local newspapers quoted the Swiss Justice Department at the weekend as saying that Nigeria would soon recover more than one billion U.S. dollars looted by Abacha.

“Swiss banks will be ordered to return 535 million dollars under an out-of-court settlement between the Nigerian government and the (Abacha) family. Under the deal, a total of around one billion dollars will be transferred to Nigeria from banks around the world. In return, the country will drop criminal proceeding against members of the former leader’s family,” the papers quoted the Swiss Justice Department statement as saying.

It is not clear whether the out-of-court settlement will include the dropping of murder charges against Mohammed, son of Abacha, who is standing trial for alleged complicity in state-organised crimes during the regime of the late dictator.

Under the settlement plan, Abacha’s family will be allowed to keep 100 million U.S. dollars of the disputed cash, which the statement said, were acquired before Abacha began his five-year rule in 1993. The dictator, who died in 1998, allegedly stole more than three billion U.S. dollars from the treasury.

In July last year, Swiss authorities returned the first instalment of 64 million U.S. dollars of an estimated 600 million U.S. dollars hidden in the country during Abacha’s rule.

Political analysts in Nigeria believe the deal will help resolve the court cases instituted against the Abacha family by the government, which has dragged on for more than three years now and for which the government has spent millions to prosecute.

It also will assuage, they say, the feelings of the political class in the northern city of Kano, Abacha’s hometown, where the government has been receiving relentless criticisms from former governor, Abubakar Rimi.

Kanu Agabi, Minister of Justice, had reportedly favoured an out-of-court settlement, arguing that protracted legal actions would prove fruitless at the end of the day.

Shina Loremikan, of the Committee for the Defence of Human Rights (CDHR), said three government officials recently fired for corruption, were never tried nor taken before the anti-corruption commission set up by the Obasanjo administration.

“The anti-corruption crusade of Obasanjo is not performing, because beyond indictment, nothing has happened to those indicted. Obasanjo is only playing a cosmetic approach to the issue of anti-corruption in Nigeria,” says Loremikan.

He claims “many ex-military governors and retired generals are busy building and owning mansions and companies worth billions of Naira and nobody knows their source of wealth, and yet government is not interested in investigating them.”

“If government is prosecuting the Abacha family and leaving many other serving and retired officers like the former military leader, General Ibrahim Babangida, and former federal capital territory minister, General Jerry Oseni, under Abacha, it shows government is being selective in the clean-up exercise,” he says.

The selective nature in prosecuting the Abacha family, he says, has made it impossible to speak in favour of the arrest and trial of members of the dictator’s family.

“They (Abacha family members) have been in detention for more than three years now, so it is just right to release them. We are interested in the rule of law. The constitution says nobody can be detained for more than 24 hours without taking him or her to court,” argues Loremikan.

“If government is sincere it wants to recover the stolen money, it should not have detained Abacha’s son in the first instance. It should have allowed him freedom within the country but barred him from travelling out and ensuring that proper investigations are carried out as to how much was stolen, where they are kept in order to prosecute them in the law of court and get a conviction. This would have helped in the recovery of the loot from abroad,” he suggests.

The case as it stands now, he says, has created more problems, leading to the continued detention without trial of members of the Abacha family.

“The only option left for the government now is recovering the money from the Abacha family and letting them off. That is the minimum this government can do under this present circumstance,” Loremikan argues.

Fredrick Fasehun, leader of the Oodua People’s Congress (OPC), a pressure group, argues that the long stay in detention of the Abacha family was causing bad blood between Obasanjo’s government and the political class in the northern city of Kano.

“It is normal to agitate against the long detention of persons without trial, that is why when some of us from the south were detained by Abacha’s regime, Yorubas from the Southwest protested. The north has a right to protest the continued detention of their sons,” Fasehun says.