Asset Recovery: Transparency Issues, Overemphasis on Abacha Loot Restricts Efforts – Group

Lack of transparency, excessive fixation on the Abacha loot, inadequate legal and accounting skills, the uncooperative attitude of accused persons and limited external support have been described as issues limiting the efforts of recovering looted assets in Nigeria.

The Executive Director, Cleen Foundation, Gad Peter made this known while delivering a key remark at a roundtable dialogue on the status of asset recovery in Nigeria held in Kano.

He said, “However the looting of public funds continued in and out of Nigeria’s estimated 170 billion USD in stolen public wealth, only 2 billion USD was recovered by the end of the former president’s administration in 2007 but more succinctly, part of what limited the efforts of that recovery agenda was the lack of transparency, an excessive fixation on the Abacha loot, inadequate legal and accounting skills. The uncooperative attitude of accused persons, and more importantly, limited external support.

“Nigeria started implementing a comprehensive anti-corruption program in 1999 under the President Olusegun Obasanjo’s administration. It was during this period that I became obvious the massive looting of public resources by Nigerian leaders and if we all remember, it was the same period Nigeria was labeled the world’s most corrupt nation.

“The efforts made by the Nigerian Government at the time brought some improvement such as the notably Increased global awareness of the issue and several important international initiatives aimed at depriving corrupt officials of the use of the International financial system to hide their ill-gotten wealth.”

However, he pointed out that while Nigeria is not where she wants to be in the asset recovery agenda, it has made significant progress as out of the many progresses that has been made proves the extent the government of the current administration is willing to be accountable to Nigerians and equally have the involvement of the citizens in the process of utilizing the funds.

“Having the opportunity to witness firsthand some of the projects where this recovered looted funds are being utilized is quite amazing, the Foundation is the monitoring civil society organization responsible for monitoring the utilization of the Abacha loot III being applied at the Abuja-Kano Road, the Second Niger Bride and the Lagos-Ibadan Expressway. The work stream areas are centered on anti-corruption, procurement, forensic auditing, engineering. Infrastructure and anti-human trafficking.”

The dialogue, which brought together stakeholders from the media and Civil Society Organisations provided the opportunity to understand in-depth the work that has been done and also reiterate the need for Nigerians to be keen about the entire process of the recovery and utilization of looted funds being everyone’s business.