Revisiting UN Treaty On Corruption

The Punch newspaper editorial of November 14, 2003 examined and commented on the United Nation’s Treaty on Corruption. The Federal Government of Nigeria is a signatory to that treaty, and that was why it sought the cooperation of the international body in the recovery of the 618 million dollars Abacha loot trapped in Switzerland.
Mr. Kofi Annan, the then UN Secretary General, announced that the world body had prepared a treaty for member nations to sign which would require them to return assets obtained through corruption to the countries from which they were stolen. According to Annan “corrupt officials will, in future, find fewer ways to hide their illicit gains.”
A meeting of member-nations of the UN was scheduled for December 9-11, 2003, in Merida, Mexico, as the final phase of the preparation of the anti-corruption treaty, which took two years for the 130 UN member-nations to draft. The 71-article-treaty covered issues like bribery, illicit enrichment, embezzlement, misappropriation, money laundering, protection of whistle blowers, freezing of assets and cooperation among members states.
The treaty was to become operational 90 days after ratification by the 130 nations, with member states urged to establish appropriate laws and agencies to deal with corruption at local level. There was a long list of items dealing with statute of limitations for prosecution of corruption cases and provisions to deal with evasion of administration of justice.
A man listed the benefits of the treaty, stating that it would be a particularly important issue for many development nations where corrupt officials had plundered their nations’ wealth. The bulk of corruption cases is in the domain of national governments and their agencies.
Although the treaty posed a serious challenge to the legal framework as well as the collective conscience of many western nations, they are the beneficiaries of corruption. It is a fact that the looting of public treasury is associated with African leaders and the political elite. It is also true that such loots have been estimated to be quite over 140 billion dollars, stashed away in western countries.
Western statistical figures would tell us that over 800 million hungry people in the world are Africans and that half of sub-Saharan Africans live on less than one dollar per day. We have also been told that Nigerians are “fantastically corrupt,” but western nations would not emphasize the truth that receiving and benefiting from stolen property is a corrupt practice. We would not be told that the worst form of violence is injustice, or that injustices result in social instability, poverty, wars, hate speech, etc, etc.
Western countries have been known to sell weapons of mass destruction including second World War ammunition to African leaders to help them destroy themselves.
Have western countries not used Africans as experimental guinea-pigs, to test new products, including drugs? Have we forgotten the “Trovan” drug that was so effective that it killed rather than save children who were treated or tested with Trovan? Just as Acquired Just as Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome (AIDS) originated in Africa (like every other evil), is it not being insinuated that corruption is an African affair, since the people are pathologically and “fantastically” corrupt?
Someone doing a study on the politics of corruption is asking lots of questions: Why are some public officials and politicians being shielded or protected while others are being chased all over the globe? Can security or intelligence agencies not become instruments for covering up delicate cases of money laundering? Have Nigerians been told the truth about “missing 12.4 billion dollar Gulf oil windfall in 1991” and the Pius Okigbo panel’s report on the matter? Was General Abacha the only looting president? Was corruption in Nigeria an invention by Goodluck Jonathan?
As promising as the UN treaty on anti-corruption may be, are there no setback on its actualization in Nigeria? Are loot receiver-nations not equally guilty? Is a selective, scapegoat system of justice not corruption, and are recovered loots not re-looted? Has the UN, in the spirit and letters of the anti-corruption treaty, done much to treat uncooperating member-nations the same way that nations suspected to be encouraging terrorism are treated?
I believe that the anti-corruption war should be fought globally with the same vigour as terrorism because both are instrumental to poverty and instability in Africa. In developed countries, corruption often takes the form of lobbying and other clever guises rather than the crude way it does in developing counties. The corrupt state of humanity is at stake in this issue.

Dr. Amirize is a retired lecturer from Rivers State University, Port Harcourt. Email:bamirize@yahoo.com.