African corruption is a crime against humanity

By Susan Dicklitch

LANCASTER, PENN. - You'd have to be living in a cave not to know that Martha Stewart got a "five and five" sentence a few weeks ago for lying about her stocks. Chances are, you're not living in a cave, but you still don't know about one of the biggest con jobs of our time: The misuse of foreign aid to Africa.

Perhaps this is because it's not as sexy as Ms. Stewart's trial or as gut-wrenching as the genocide in the Darfur region of Sudan. Or perhaps, it is because it has been such an embarrassment to Western governments and private organizations who keep on believing that foreign aid will help Africa.

As long as corruption exists at its current levels in Africa, and as long as donors continue to look the other way, foreign aid will simply serve to keep African kleptocrats in power.

Consider this: Sub-Saharan Africa has received an estimated $114 billion in bilateral and multilateral aid from 1995-2002. Yet African countries have consistently ended up at the bottom of the United Nations Development Program's Human Development report, which measures life expectancy, gross domestic product per person, and literacy.

So you may ask the billion-dollar question: Where did the money go? Perhaps the British high commissioner to Kenya, Edward Clay, was asking the same question about official graft last month when - suggesting donor aid to Kenya could be suspended - he publicly accused unnamed Kenyan officials of behaving so gluttonously at the aid trough that they are now "vomiting on the shoes" of donors.

And sub-Saharan Africa has seen the likes of many gluttons. Some of the most infamous include Mobutu Sese Seko, the former president of Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of Congo) who allegedly stole $5 billion, and Sani Abacha, former president of Nigeria, who allegedly looted more than $2 billion. Both former leaders are dead, but their legacy of corruption continues to afflict their nations.

Corruption may not be as bad as genocide, but it is also a crime against humanity. Corruption is a killer of initiative and trust. It drives away foreign investment and undermines the development of the rule of law.

But most callously, corruption robs African children of a better future. Just ask the students in Kenya who could have had 15,000 new classrooms with the $188 million that Mr. Clay alleged has gone missing under President Mwai Kibaki's so-called anticorruption administration.

Transparency International, a Berlin-based nongovernmental organization (NGO) that tracks global corruption, ranks most African countries at the bottom of its list. Even some of the purported African success stories, such as Uganda, are at the bottom of that list.

But is there hope for the future? Much hope has been placed in the New Partnership for African Development (NEPAD), an Africa-wide initiative that calls for good governance, accountability, and a peer-review mechanism as part of its monitoring process.

The African Union (AU) - the successor of the Organization for African Unity - even adopted a Convention on Preventing and Combating Corruption last year, and 30 countries have signed it. But only three countries have ratified it - and it requires 15 ratifications to take force.

The UN has also initiated a UN Convention Against Corruption that has been signed by more than 100 countries, including Kenya which has also ratified it.

But why should America care? While many Americans are debating whether Martha Stewart should have gotten more or less than the five months in prison and five months house arrest she got for lying about her stocks, African bureaucrats are literally getting away with millions. For donor agencies and nations, as well as African societies themselves, not to make political and civil leaders accountable for aid money is to be complicit in the perpetuation of corruption.

Congress is poised to increase foreign development assistance to the world's poorest nations by nearly $2 billion, with most of that money going to combat HIV and AIDS. But HIV and AIDS spending is not free from corruption either. Fly-by-night briefcase NGOs have sprung up everywhere, even with AIDS funds and even in countries that have a great track record like Uganda.

Some donors have taken a hard line against corruption, such as DANIDA (Danish International Development Agency) which cut off aid to Malawi and Kenya as a consequence of blatant corruption. The IMF and the World Bank have also instituted the HIPC Initiative (Highly Indebted Poor Country), which provides debt reduction tocountries that have developed transparency, accountability, and a poverty reduction strategy. To date, 23 of the 27 countries under the HIPC initiative are African.

The US Millennium Challenge Account - which disburses aid to recipient countries on the basis of their good governance, health and education initiatives, and free market economic policies - is a step in the right direction.

Ultimately the only real security against corruption is if Africans make their leaders accountable and demand transparency. The international community has an obligation to help eradicate poverty, but the international community also has the right and the obligation to demand accountability and transparency as well. Donors should work more closely with each other to ensure that African governments that turn a blind eye to corruption get cut off from foreign aid.

Kudos, not criticism, should go to Edward Clay for having the courage to speak bluntly against corruption in Africa.

• Susan Dicklitch is associate professor of government at Franklin & Marshall College and has conducted research in Uganda, Cameroon, and Ghana. She wrote 'The Elusive Promise of NGOs in Africa: Lessons from Uganda.'

Frederick Chiluba - Thief!

Mr. Chiluba owned more than 100 pairs of size 6 shoes, many affixed with his initials in brass. He is just a little over five feet tall, and each pair has heels close to two inches high.

LUSAKA, Zambia — As the gleaming black Mercedes-Benz pulled up to the courthouse, an aide rushed to the passenger door, bowed deeply and then ceremoniously opened it. A foot, finely shod in a dove-gray shoe, appeared, followed by the rest of the man, Frederick Chiluba.

For a decade, he was president of Zambia. Now, more than seven years after he left office, a court is deciding whether he stole from his impoverished people. A verdict is to be announced July 20.

As common thieves and drug peddlers milled about, Mr. Chiluba strode through the corridors to his hearing, shaking hands, smiling magnanimously, throwing an arm around a co-defendant to chuckle over a private joke.

Amid men in dingy shirts and worn trousers, he was impeccably dressed in a double-breasted charcoal suit, with a red silk handkerchief peeking from his breast pocket and a gold, diamond-studded watch glinting at his wrist.

But once he was in the dock, his jovial demeanor evaporated. In the thin, sickly light that filtered in from narrow windows one recent morning, Mr. Chiluba replied somberly when the magistrate asked why his lawyers had failed to present a written summation on time.

“I wasn’t aware, your honor, until today that the submissions are not made,” he said.

Mr. Chiluba is a rarity in Africa, a Big Man brought low by corruption charges. He says he has done nothing illegal, but his many critics say his fall was brought on by the usual sins of the powerful — greed, vanity and pride — and a major tactical blunder: he underestimated the man he handpicked in 2001 to succeed him as president, the plodding, diligent lawyer Levy Mwanawasa.

Mr. Mwanawasa died last year after an illness. But his pursuit of Mr. Chiluba outlived him.

“Chiluba called himself the political engineer and he believed Mwanawasa would be his puppet,” said Mark Chona, who was appointed by Mr. Mwanawasa to lead a task force to investigate abuses of the Chiluba era. “But he misread Mwanawasa. For us, it was divine providence.”

Even as Mr. Chiluba awaited judgment, his wife, Regina, was convicted on corruption charges in March and sentenced to three and a half years in prison.

Mr. Chiluba faced a London civil court judgment in 2007 in a case brought by Zambia’s attorney general. He is still contesting the payment of damages.

In that case, Justice Peter Smith of the High Court ruled that the former president owed Zambia $57 million for, among other things, expenditures from a secret intelligence agency bank account in London that was “set up primarily to steal government money.”

“He should be ashamed,” Sir Peter wrote.

The judge concluded that though Mr. Chiluba had a salary of only about $10,000 a year during his decade in office, he spent more than $500,000 in a single shop, Boutique Basile, in Geneva.

“The president (unlike the emperor) needs to be clothed,” Sir Peter archly noted in his judgment.

The shop owner, Antonio Basile, testified last year that payment for the clothes sometimes arrived in suitcases stuffed with cash.

The goods are now stored in battered metal trunks by Zambia’s anticorruption task force. There are piles of designer suits, monogrammed dress shirts and elegant ties, silk pajamas and dressing gowns.

But most remarkable are the more than 100 pairs of size 6 shoes, many affixed with Mr. Chiluba’s initials in brass. He is just a little over five feet tall, and each pair has heels close to two inches high. They are a riot of color and texture: jade-green lizard skin and burgundy suede, cream-color ostrich and lustrous red silk.

As his second term drew to a close, Mr. Chiluba claimed that a popular clamor had arisen for him to stay in office. A third term would have required amending the Constitution. But by then, Mr. Chiluba, a former trade union leader elected as a reformer, led a government renowned for corruption. Civic groups and churches organized to stop him, and succeeded.

Not long after he withdrew from political life, The Post, an independent newspaper, quoted a member of Parliament as saying that Mr. Chiluba was a thief. The state pressed charges of criminal libel against The Post’s editor and the politician.

The legal maneuver backfired. Mutembo Nchito, the brash young lawyer representing The Post pro bono, effectively put Mr. Chiluba’s integrity on trial. He won access to records of the intelligence agency bank account in London, and discovered evidence of generous payments to Mr. Chiluba’s children, the boutique and even the chief justice of the Zambian Supreme Court, among others.

“You never expect to find a smoking gun,” he said in wonderment.

But before Mr. Nchito could introduce the bank records into evidence, he needed President Mwanawasa’s permission.

Mr. Mwanawasa, who could have cited national security to hush up the scandal, instead gave Mr. Nchito permission to use the records, led an effort to strip Mr. Chiluba of immunity and named Mr. Chona to head the task force on corruption. Mr. Nchito was hired to prosecute criminal charges against Mr. Chiluba, who was accused of stealing about $500,000.

The task force, now headed by Maxwell Nkole, has won convictions against Ms. Chiluba and former military commanders, among others.

Mr. Mwanawasa not only pushed the prosecution of a leader from his own party but also, in the final months of his life, sharply criticized President Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe for his violent repression of the opposition there. Despite his staid manner, Mr. Mwanawasa proved himself a maverick, challenging the patronage politics and tolerance for authoritarian rule that have marred many postcolonial African nations, historians and analysts say.

Mr. Chiluba, in unsworn testimony earlier this year, expressed outrage at what he saw as Mr. Mwanawasa’s rank betrayal.

“The presidency in Africa is not cheap,” Mr. Chiluba said, according to a transcript. “People die to secure the presidency. But here was Mr. Mwanawasa, who received it on a silver platter from my hands. He stabbed me in the back badly. I still bleed.”

In his testimony, Mr. Chiluba denied that he had ever stolen public money. Instead, he said that he had spent money donated in political campaigns by corporate interests and other “well-wishers.” The identity of these contributors was secret because of what Mr. Chiluba called “the golden rule of anonymity.” The donors, he said, were made aware that “the party’s president has personal needs.”

After the recent hearing, Mr. Chiluba walked quickly to his Mercedes, waving off questions with a flick of his hand.

Back in the courtroom, Moffat Kabamba, a skinny 21-year-old in windbreaker and sneakers, was the next defendant in the dock. He was charged with stealing a cellphone and a bicycle. He mournfully confided that he had decided to confess because he was guilty.

New York Times