By Farooq A. Kperogi
Twitter: @farooqkperogi
In her historical fictional narrative titled “The Lost
Sisterhood,” Danish-Canadian writer Anne Fortier quotes one of her characters
as saying that “those who control the present can rewrite the past.” This is
playing out right before us in what I called the curious posthumous deodorization of Abacha’s grand larceny in a May 7, 2020 social
media update.
Loyalists and
beneficiaries of Sani Abacha’s dictatorship control Nigeria’s present, and they
are trying to exploit this privilege to rewrite the sordid past of their
benefactor while the rest of the country is fixated on other issues.
Muhammadu Buhari has always been invested in cleansing
Abacha’s appallingly grubby reputation as a murderous larcener. During the 10th-year-rememberance
anniversary of Abacha in Kano in June 2008, for instance, Muhammadu Buhari remarked
that, contrary to settled narratives in the Nigerian public sphere, Abacha
never stole from Nigeria.
This 2008 Buhari declaration birthed a fringe, outlandish
but nonetheless popular narrative in northern Nigeria that Abacha’s reputation
as a ruthless crook who stole billions of Nigeria’s patrimony and salted it
away in Euro-American financial institutions was the handiwork of Olusegun
Obasanjo who was taking a posthumous pound of flesh from Abacha for imprisoning
him.
In the aftermath of the unrelenting repatriation of what has
now been called the “Abacha loot” from Western banks, a new farcical story line
was fabricated, which is that Abacha actually “saved” the money for Nigeria for
a rainy day!
Apart from Buhari’s public defense of Abacha’s larceny in
2008, the posthumous discursive purification of Abacha’s image as a greedy,
conscienceless thief was largely informal and took place on the margins of
polite society.
Abubakar Malami, Buhari’s Attorney General and Minister of
Justice, officialized the revisionism of Abacha’s thievery. In a May 4, 2020 tweet, Malami described repatriated
Abacha loot as “Abacha assets.” “I am happy to confirm that the Federal
Republic of Nigeria on Monday 4th May, 2020 received $311,797,866.11
of the Abacha assets repatriated from the United States and the Bailiwick of
Jersey,” he wrote.
The change from “Abacha loot” to “Abacha assets” was a willful
rhetorical move designed to lend official credence to the hitherto fringy,
informal but nevertheless robust narrative that Abacha didn’t steal Nigeria’s
money.
Led by Sahara Reporter’s Omoyele Sowore, Nigerians on social
media pounced on Malami’s tweet and compelled him to retract his incompetent
attempt at revisionism. In a woolly, shamefaced, error-ridden retraction, Malami said, “It is to be noted that by way of antecedence [sic] that
Attorney-General of the Federation and Minister of Justice, Abubakar Malami,
SAN has been consistently describing the recovered funds as ‘Abacha loot’ at
several fora during the process of recovery of the looted funds, particularly
before the eventual repatriation of the funds.”
But it didn’t stop there. Buba Galadima, a former Buhari protégé
who is now at loggerheads with him because he has been shut out of the orbit of
governance, has taken off from where Malami backed off. In a May 17, 2020 interview
with The Nation, he said the estimated $5 billion Sani Abacha stole
from Nigeria's trough was actually "saved" for Nigeria—on the advice
of Gaddafi and Saddam Hussein—in anticipation of US sanction against Nigeria so
that "even if Nigeria's account was blocked by the US, there won't be
panic."
Galadima, who was Director General of the National Maritime
Authority during the Abacha junta, said the notion that Abacha stole from Nigeria’s
till is “based on ignorance.” When an editor forwarded excerpts of the
interview to me on WhatsApp, I’d dismissed it as fabricated. I was wrong.
As I pointed out on social media on May 17, the idea that the
Abacha loot was “saved” for Nigeria stands logic on its head, considering that
Abacha "saved" some of that money in the US whose impending blockage
he was allegedly plotting against. How do you "hide" something from
someone by "saving" it in his house?
Plus, even Buhari, the choirmaster of the Abacha sanitization
chorus, has grudgingly conceded that his former boss stole from Nigeria’s public
treasury. For example, in an April 27, 2016 tweet, Buhari said, “Nigeria is
awaiting receipt from Swiss Govt. of $320 million, identified as illegally
taken from Nigeria under Abacha.”
“Illegally taken” is merely a synonym for stealing. In a
February 4, 2020 statement from the US Embassy in Nigeria about the
repatriation of the “Abacha loot” from US banks, the US government was unambiguous
in stating how the money got to its banks.
“The monies were laundered by [Abacha’s] family, including
his sons Ibrahim and Mohammed, and a number of close associates,” the statement from the US reads. “The laundering operation extended to the
United States and European jurisdictions such as the UK, France, Germany,
Switzerland, Lichtenstein and Luxembourg.”
One of those associates who helped Abacha launder huge sums of
money is Kebbi State Governor Atiku Bagudu to whom the Buhari regime wanted to
hand over $100 million of the recovered money, according to Bloomberg, but for
the resistance of the US government. If the money was “saved” for Nigeria, why
did Buhari want to hand over some of it to a person who has been identified as an
accomplice in its theft?
The US Department of Justice identified Bagudu as one of
Abacha’s network of proteges that, “embezzled, misappropriated and extorted
billions from the government of Nigeria.”
It isn’t only the US that unequivocally describes the repatriated
funds as the product of Abacha’s criminal despoliation of Nigeria’s resources. In
a June 12, 2017 Radio France International report titled “Swiss make deal with Nigeria on final payout for Abacha loot,” we learn that “The
cash was originally frozen in Luxembourg and confiscated by the Swiss as part
of a criminal investigation into Abba Abacha, Sani Abacha’s son. Switzerland
had already returned some 700 million dollars following appeals by Nigeria.”
In a “Stolen Asset Recovery Initiative - Asset Recovery Watch” bulletin, there’s also a case
against “Family of former President Sani Abacha,” where we read that, “In 2006,
the World Bank was involved in a similar framework, providing institutional
support for the return and use of approx. $723 million in public funds that had
been corruptly diverted by General Abacha.”
Not all the money Abacha stole has been recovered. Of the $5
billion that Abacha looted and squirreled away—or "saved" for
Nigeria, to use Galadimian logic—in the banks of countries that wanted to
"block" Nigeria's money, $3.624 billion has been recovered so far.
Can Galadima help Nigeria recover the rest of the money since he appears to
know where the money has been "saved"?
The purveyors of the transparently fraudulent narrative that
Abacha “saved” money for Nigeria in foreign banks which his detractors have
decided to call “loot” should be told that they can’t rewrite history.
People, mostly young northerners who hadn’t come of age when
Abacha’s evil regime reigned, have sent me private messages asking that I help
stop the “demonization” of Abacha. For them, it’s a regional and religious
project. But that’s misguided. Islam teaches us to be fair, just, and truthful.
It doesn’t teach us to lie to salvage the image of a dead thief among us.
The unvarnished truth is that Abacha did NOT save money for Nigeria; he STOLE from it with conscienceless glee. It’s distressing that one has to even say this in spite of the clear evidence that stares us in the face.
