1. The incoming government in Ghana wants to recover “loot” presumedly stashed by outgoing government functionaries in dark corners around the world. A preparatory committee has been named to expedite the initiative, dubbed ORAL.
2. It is a common refrain of new governments in Africa to beat the drums about the ill-gotten gains of their predecessors. In many countries, the enthusiasm rarely matches the results.
3. Yet, there are countries like Nigeria, Angola, Uzbekistan, and others that have implemented recovery measures that have netted billions.
4. There is certainly international recognition of what is at stake in this fight. In 2020, the African Union issued the Addis Ababa declaration on the African Common Position on Asset Recovery.
As far back as 2007, the World Bank and the UN Office on Drugs & Crime set up the Stolen Assets Recovery (STAR) Initiative.
5. About 70 countries are active members of the STAR. Of these, at least 75% have used the system at least once to trace proceeds of corruption hoarded abroad. In 2023 alone, 20 countries called upon STAR for support.
6. Yet, just about $5 billion has been uncovered and recovered globally through STAR as of 2022. Consider that the African Union estimates illegal capital flight from Africa alone to amount to nearly $150 billion annually.
7. My honest view is that countries that have done well using recovery mechanisms such as Nigeria (eg. the multibillion dollar Abacha loot saga) experience high levels of a particular form of official looting: EMBEZZLEMENT. Officials embezzle funds when they brazenly divert public funds to private use.
8. Ghana’s bloody revolutionary history has made embezzlement a very high-risk practice. In my long experience of working in the policy and governance arena, I have come to the conclusion that there are VERY LOW LEVELS of embezzlement in Ghana. The recent Masloc incident, for instance, is quite rare in Ghana.
9. The forms of official looting that prevail in Ghana are more subtle without being any less pernicious and extensive than the classic Abacha-style embezzlement cases that occur elsewhere.
10. I have dubbed some variants of the Ghanaian modes of behaviour that can lead to official looting, State Enchantment. But there are several other “ways and means.” Most of these mechanisms are wrapped tightly around legitimate, even praiseworthy, official activities. Thus, officials are rarely shy from justifying their schemes. Contorted paths are used to enrich cronies, and then even more contorted paths are used to deliver large chunks of the loot to officials.
11. This has led to a frustrating situation. Everyone in Ghana senses that looting is pervasive, leading to a very low bar of accusations. Yet, conclusively proving and mapping the looting chain is fiendishly hard, leading to an impossibly high bar of conviction. The level of sophistication needed to parse such schemes also alienate most citizens from actively following discussions about them. Think of the sheer embroidery that was Agyapa, the mesmerising Ghana Card bonanza, and the current fiesta of Rosy Royal. Some of the people involved are more likely to receive national awards than public stigma.
12. Hugely inflated contracts, high fiscal deficits, aborted projects all over, and the shame of becoming the first African country to witness a government default on its domestic debt, all seem intimately connected in Ghana’s plight, yet barely 10 officials in the last two decades have seen the inside of a jail room for “looting”.
13. My thinking is that the nature of what may be called looting in Ghana makes the conventional recovery measures that are more suited for embezzlement elsewhere much harder to deploy to recover large sums of money for the Ghanaian people in the country’s current situation. Whilst the government should, obviously, use all the classical instruments available to it to recover any looted funds or assets, it would be wise to recognise the constraints and limitations of the recovery process, and focus as much on blocking the leakages that will persist regardless of who is in power as on digging up the hoards of past officials. The country’s finances are dire. Any cash will do, whether it is savings made from blocking leakages or loot recovered from the stash of venal courtiers of the ancien régime.
14. Vitally, given how endemic the rip-off schemes in Ghana are, the official state alone can’t do the work. Often, the looting strategy is embedded in the fabric of official practice itself.
15. I will continue to insist that we empower the civil society (CSO) movement, which in its proper form operates outside the state, to become a dynamic chaos-agent within policy execution. CSOs should be positioned so that they have extensive access to intelligence and information. Furthermore, they should be granted a direct counter-positional role in project design, governance, classic monitoring, and evaluation. Obviously, no government will smile at such a suggestion. Powerful non-government stakeholders would just have to insist.
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