Africa: When political parasites collude with Western Multinational vampires.

By Lord Aikins Adusei

Africa is a continent whose people should have been one of the richest in the world however decades of independence has produced nothing more than failed states where people live on less $2 a day. Life expectancy in Africa is the lowest compared to what exist in other developing regions. At the heart of this poverty is the symbiosis relationship between the Africa's governing elite and Western Multinational Corporations that exploit Africa's rich natural resources.

The poor state of majority of African nations can be blamed on Africa's political leadership and the equally guilty western multinational corporations as well as the global financial institutions such as the IMF and World Bank which make billions of dollars of profits while majority of the people live in total squalor. These parasites do not only contribute to the destruction and pollution of soil, rivers, lakes and the environment but also help to steal and hide the money that could be used to help the poor.

Whenever a government in Africa is corrupt there are always multinational corporations and their shareholders who stand behind him and push him to become more corrupt. Whenever a government becomes autocratic denying its people freedoms and rights there are multinational corporations behind him providing weapons to exact violence against its people. Whenever there is a corrupt politician in Africa stealing money meant for the building of schools, hospitals, roads, and delivery of water and sanitation you have big multinational banks assisting in the transfer of the money to safe haven destinations. This cosy and symbiosis relationship between the political and business elite in Africa and the multinational corporations in Europe and North America does not only affect governance but it is one of the main reasons why economic underachievement, poverty, hunger and instability permeate in almost all African countries. The parasites who parade themselves as leaders of the continent have over the years colluded and connived with the multinational vampires who since the day of slavery have been the main instrument used by western governments to strip Africa of its rich resources and to keep its inhabitants desperately poor.

Global Witness has produced documents that have implicated American, Belgian, British, French, German, Japanese, and Chinese firms and business entities. The dirty tactics employed by Western governments, their multinational corporations, the World Bank, IMF and the World Trade Organization are responsible for the demise of the African continent. Western governments led by the United States, Britain and France continue to sell weapons to dictators to crash democratic forces throughout the continent. They continue to finance brutal civil wars in Libya, Ivory Coast, Somalia, and DRC with the aim of keeping Africa destabilized while their corporations steal the natural resources such as oil, gas, gold and other precious metals in complicity of the western media.

In a similar vein Global Financial Integrity has demonstrated how Western multinationals working in Africa use fraud accounting, tax invasion and other financial malpractices to cheat Africans of the billions of dollars that could be used to develop the continent. IMF and the World Bank on their part are in cahoots with the multinationals and western creditors to sell toxic economic policies and poisonous, heavily laden conditional loans to African countries that keep them in odious debts that they spend so much of their GDP in servicing them to the neglect of the human security needs of their people. Switzerland hiding behind her discredited illegal financial and banking secrecy laws and infrastructures continues to play host to most of the $148 billion dollars that is siphoned off from the continent annually by the political and business leaders.

There are nations in Africa whose citizens should have been counted among the world's richest people but are in fact surviving on less than two dollars a day courtesy the corrupt politicians who are managing the countries and their corrupt friends in Europe and America. Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, Angola, Nigeria and Congo are some of the countries whose citizens should have enjoyed one of the highest standards of living in the world but who are found at the bottom of all the social indicators published by the UNDP, ILO, EIA and other major bodies.

The case of Nigeria: Nigeria, Royal Shell, dictatorship, massive corruption, poverty and instability

The reputation of Nigeria as a failed state is known throughout the world. It started with their leaders amassing the oil wealth instead of using it to build a country in which every Nigerian could be proud of. The leaders signed shady oil deals with corrupt oil companies. They diverted oil revenue into their personal bank accounts in Switzerland, Monaco, Britain, United States and the Caribbean with the assistance of corrupt banks operating in and outside the country. They inflated cost of projects and made fortunes at the expense of the poor people and the country. Military Generals staged coups and countercoups to take their share of what they saw as free money and the politicians and civilian governments have continued in the same direction. Strongly behind the corrupt politicians are the equally corrupt multinational corporations (Shell, ExxonMobil and Barclays Bank) who do not only bribe the politicians but also assist them in hiding their loots in safe havens to avoid detection.

That 70 per cent of Nigerians are poor today can be placed right on the door step of Nigerian governments on one hand and Shell and BP, IMF and the World Bank on the other. The oil corporations in particular, in their quest for excessive profits have succeeded in destroying most of the land, rivers and ecological services on which the livelihood of the people is based. Shell and its counterparts have succeeded in destroying the Niger Delta because they pay huge bribes to their symbiosis political friends who do nothing to stop them from destroying the environment and the livelihoods of the people.

During the brutal Sani Abacha dictatorship, Royal Dutch Shell Oil corporation was accused of not only destroying Niger Delta and polluting its land, rivers, lakes but was also encouraged Abacha to executive Ken Saro-Wiwa and Ogoni eight a charge for demonstrating against the company. Shell admitted and paid 15.5 million dollars to settle it. During the time when Shell and other oil companies were paying bribes to Abacha and his cronies the multinational financial institutions in Nigeria led by Barclays Bank were also assisting Abacha to transfer his loot (amounting to over 3 billion dollars) to Switzerland via Britain.

The cost of corruption by Nigeria's political elite backed by the indifference of multinational vampires is that in Kaduna, Kano, Maiduguri and major cities in the north of the country abandoned children with plates in their hands going from house to house begging for food are visible everywhere. Fuel shortages and drivers queuing for oil are frequent occurrence in a country that boasts itself as Sub Sahara Africa's leading oil producer and exporter. Electricity supply is rationed and back up generators are everywhere although the country has over 36 billion barrels of oil in the ground not to mention large quantities of gas which is wasted everyday through flaring and the abundance of sunshine that goes wasted despite the fact only 51% of the nation has electricity coverage [1]. During the inauguration of the current President Goodluck Jonathan the bosses of the companies in the country pleaded with him to solve the notoriously unreliable electricity sector but nothing seems to have changed on the ground.

Infrastructure decay is everywhere. Graduate unemployment is skyrocketing. Illiteracy is widespread. The educational system which produced Chinua Achebe, Nnamdi Azikiwe, Tafawa Balewa, and Wolen Soyinka and which was once the jewel of the nation is nothing to write home about and those who can afford it are now sending their children abroad to be educated.

Nigerian cities are full of unmanaged waste, filth and diseases are rampant as municipalities and health officials struggle to do their best with the near absence of resources. Even Abuja the supposedly planned federal capital has not escape the problems as the following statement shows:

“From Lagos which is ranked as one of the fastest growing cities in the world and yet the dirtiest and least liveable to Abuja, our supposedly modern capital city … the story is the same. There is entropy of organized disorder, decay of infrastructure facilities …inefficient waste management system. [Abuja] was properly conceived to contrast with the crisis-ridden Lagos … Greed, corruption and avarice of highly placed government officials including politicians thwarted the Abuja plan…Consequently, unconformity and chaos reigned in Abuja” [2].

The list of wrongdoing continues unabated. With top government officials so brazenly violating the social contract, everyone from top police officers to junior civil servants downstream inevitably follows suit. The speaker of the country's law making chamber was recently arrested for stealing millions of dollars and using the nation as collateral for loans he took from the bank. In 2009 the governor of the Central Bank was forced to intervene to save the financial and banking sector after bank managers misappropriated billions of dollars of people's deposits.

The Nigerian constitution stipulates that under 50 percent of national oil revenue must be distributed to state and local governments, and that an additional 13 percent must go to the nine oil-producing states of the Niger delta. Last year that amounted to almost $6 billion for the nine delta states—plenty, it would seem, to take care of basic social services. The problem, however, is that the money goes to the governors' offices and then simply disappears. A financial-crimes commission was recently formed to investigate all the country's 36 governors, and it wound up accusing 31 of them of corruption. The most apparently egregious case was that of Diepreye Alamieyeseigha, who was accused of embezzling hundreds of millions of dollars while he was governor of Bayelsa State. He fled to England, was arrested for money-laundering, jumped bail, and slipped back into Nigeria dressed as a woman. (The English authorities had his passport.) When asked how he managed to make the trip, he said he had no idea. “All the glory goes to God,” [3] he explained.

The growing instability, violence and crime in the country that has claimed thousands of lives both in the north and in the south is grounded in the corruption, poverty, inequality, unequal access to resources, lack of economic opportunities, and bad governance pushed on the people by the corrupt government and the oil majors in the country. But one thing that usually does not get mentioned especially in the Western Corporate media is how multinational corporations operating in the country fuel the conflict and cycle of violence through their operations. The conflict and poverty-induced violence would have been prevented if Shell had played its role responsibly.

Today Nigeria belongs to the exclusive club of 'Resource Curse' and 'Failed state' nations, thanks to the mismanagement of the country by parasitic political and business elites together with corrupt oil multinational vampires.

This is the true nature of the situation in Africa and in Nigeria where fabulously corrupt politicians have hooked up with multinational vampires and bloodsuckers to impoverish the people who have no way to escape their assault. With politicians unwilling to salvage the continent from endemic corruption, poverty, political instability, and economic underperformance the responsibility falls on civil society, the academia, the emerging middle class, students and individual citizens to wrestle the continent from the political parasites and the multinational vampires. Every effort must be made to put the dictators and the corrupt multinationals on trial as it is happening in Egypt where Hosni Mubarak, his two sons and his ministers are standing trial for stealing and misruling Egypt.

Please see parts 2 and 3 on Angola, Gabon, Equatorial Guinea and the role of France

Notes
1. Eberhard, A. et al., (2008) 'Underpowered: The State of the Power Sector in Sub-Saharan Africa'

2. Onyanta Adama, from her PhD Dissertation: 'Governing from above: solid waste management in Nigeria's new capital city of Abuja', 2007 page 15.

3. Sunday Dare, 'The Curious Bonds of Oil Diplomacy', November 6, 2002.