It was just the sort of message British Finance Minister Gordon Brown wanted to see. As he arrived at the Hilton in the Nigerian capital of Abuja this week to warn Africa that stamping out corruption was the flipside of greater financial generosity from the West, the TV monitor behind the reception desk said: ”Important notice. Anti-money-laundering measures are observed in this hotel.”
As far as Brown was concerned, this was evidence that the penny had dropped among Africa’s political elite.
After the energy that marked out 2005 as the year to ”Make Poverty History”, 2006 has been the year in which there has been pressure on both donors and recipients to deliver on their promises.
Brown took the trouble to spend half a day in Nigeria because he believes it is on the right track at last, after poor governance and venality made it a pariah in the 1990s.
Britain has been backing the clean-up efforts of President Olusegun Obasanjo’s administration, and Brown has struck up a close relationship with Nigeria’s Finance Minister, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala. She has been spearheading attempts to ensure that money from the write-off of $18-billion of debt earlier this year finds its way into improving the lives of the 100-million Nigerians who live on less than a dollar a day.
Brown said: ”African finance mini-sters know that if they don’t have proper transparency, fail to open their books and allow people to shine a light on their finances, they will lose not only with their own public but with the international community.”
Brown said that better systems were now in place and that there was more public pressure ”to disclose the truth, it is more difficult now to siphon off money and the key to all this is transparency”.
Nigeria has started its war against corruption from a low base. In a league table compiled by the NGO Transparency International, Nigeria ranked 152nd out of 159 countries.
Britain, however, has taken the pragmatic view that corruption is not something that can be eradicated overnight and, to a large extent, is a symptom of extreme poverty as well as its cause.
The United Kingdom has been willing to support governments provided they are heading in the right direction. In Tanzania, the Department for International Development provides budget support. ”There is widespread corruption, but Tanzania is one of the few countries heading in the right direction,” said David Stanton, the department’s Tanzanian -representative.
”That’s one of the reasons we are continuing to back the government and put money in through budget support. If you put money in at the top, it is coming out at the bottom in terms of the poverty indicators.”
Similarly, it is recognised that Nigeria has a long way to go. Obasanjo, up until recently, looked set to defy the Constitution and run for a third term. Those cynical about the crackdown have argued that — for all the high-profile arrests — nobody has yet been jailed. — Â