Tag Archives: Gabon

ECOWAS Must Get Serious About Corruption—or the Coups Will Continue

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The Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) was founded in 1975 to foster economic cooperation within West Africa. Over time, ECOWAS’s mission has expanded to include the promotion of democracy and political stability. And for a while, it looked like the region was indeed making progress on this front: Between 2015 and 2020, all fifteen ECOWAS member countries were democratic states. But since 2020, West and Central Africa have been hit with a wave of eight military coups, the most recent ones occurring this past July (in Niger) and August (in Gabon). ECOWAS’s response to this democratic backsliding has been unimpressive. For example, ECOWAS looked on passively when, in 2020, both Ivorian President Alassane Ouattara and Guinea’s then-President Alpha Condé ignored or circumvented constitutional limits on their terms. Just this month, Senegal President Macky Sall unilaterally delayed presidential elections for the first time in the nation’s history. Recently, ECOWAS—under pressure from the US and EU—did impose sanctions against Niger in response to the coup, but these sanctions were insufficient to get the coup leaders to step down. In fact, these sanctions were so ineffective that they caused coup-hit Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger to withdraw from the bloc, citing “illegal, illegitimate, inhumane and irresponsible sanctions” and failure to support their fight against “terrorism and insecurity.” All this has begun to jeopardize ECOWAS’s credibility even in the eyes of local populations.

Perhaps more seriously, ECOWAS has lost credibility not only for its response to the coups, but also for its failure to address the root causes of these coups, including not only economic woes, but also endemic corruption. As a coalition of West African civil society organizations recently asserted, ECOWAS operates as “a club of Head of States, whose sole preoccupation is regime protection of the various West African leaders, and their penchant for appropriating the benefits of office to themselves, while the ordinary citizens of countries in the sub-region wallow in extreme poverty, misery, and penury.”

ECOWAS could and should take concrete steps to bolster its waning authority. One of the most effective ways it could do so is by taking a strong stand against corruption. This would not be taking ECOWAS far outside the scope of its existing mandate. The ECOWAS Protocol on the Fight against Corruption authorized ECOWAS to take action “whenever an act of corruption is committed or produces some effects in a State Party.” More generally, given the threat that corruption poses to both democracy and stability, ECOWAS is justified in more decisive action to address this scourge.

In particular, there are three things that ECOWAS ought to do:

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Any Change is Progress? African Citizens Hope the Coups will Leave the Fight against Corruption in Better Hands

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Africa has seen a recent spate of military coups—from Mali to Guinea to Burkina Faso to Niger to Gabon. Most Western powers have condemned these coups. But many Africans have rejoiced, or at least have been far less concerned. For example, a survey conducted shortly after the coup in Niger suggests that most people in four other West African countries (Mali, Ghana, Nigeria, and Ivory Coast) believed that the Niger coup was justified. Why the dissonance between Western and African reactions to these coups?

The answer has to do with the dysfunction and corruption of many nominally “democratic” African governments. Endemic corruption has destroyed public trust in African democracy, and coup leaders have made it clear that corruption is one of the core justifications for their takeovers. Whether this is sincere, a pretext, or a combination, it is clear that the coup leaders are tapping into a sense of genuine public grievance, and that many citizens in these countries have become so frustrated with their elected governments that they would willingly trade electoral democracy for a government with the political will to fight corruption and improve living conditions.

For this reason, it would be an error to see African citizens’ support for these coups as evidence of a turn against genuine democracy. But there is an enormous gap between genuine democracy and the reality of electoral democracy as it exists in many African countries. Westerners who are surprised by African citizens’ support for the recent coups have underestimated just how poorly the corruption of the previous regimes had devastated public trust.

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TI France Demands Dismissal of Gabon Government Claim to be Corruption Victim

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TI France is moving to block an audacious, underhanded move by the Gabonese government to frustrate the confiscation of hundreds of millions in assets stolen from its citizens.  The assets are likely to be confiscated as part of the proceedings known as Bien Mal Acquis (wrongfully acquired assets), where French prosecutors are investigating the ruling families of Gabon, Equatorial Guinea and the Republic of the Congo for buying hundreds of millions of euros of French real estate and other properties with corrupt monies. In 2017, in the first case to go to trial, €150 million in French assets were confiscated from Equatorial Guineans First Vice President Teodorin Obiang (here).

Apparently anticipating a similar result, the Gabonese government recently joined the proceedings as a partie civile or civil party.  Under French law, if a court orders the confiscation of the Gabonese ruling family’s assets, the Gabonese government would then have a claim to some if not all of the assets under the theory it is entitled to recover damages suffered by the ruling family’s corruption. A just and reasonable outcome were a democratically elected government committed to its citizens’ welfare in power.

Tragically, for the Gabonese people this is not the case.  The same family responsible for stealing the nation’s wealth, the Bongos, remains in power.  TI France has now moved to have the government’s claim to be a civil party dismissed. This should be an easy decision for the presiding magistrate given how well the Bongo family’s corruption has been documented. 

The continued active participation of civil society in the landmark Bien Mal Acquis case shows how critical it is that anticorruption NGOs to represent those like the citizens of Gabon, Equatorial Guinea, and the Republic of the Congo where their governments make it impossible for corruption victims to bring cases on their own.  The TI Press Release on its move to strike the Gabonese government as a civil party is here. The origins of Bien Mal Acquis and its lessons are discussed here.

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How We Did It: the U.S. Congress’ Exposure of the Grand Scale of Global Corruption

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 Over the past two decades the U.S. Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations has laid bare how Gabonese President Omar Bongo, Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, Equatorial Guinean President Teodoro Obiang, and a gaggle of friends and relatives of the leaders of Mexico, Pakistan, Nigeria, Angola, Saudi Arabia, and other countries conspired with large, prestigious banks to hide the enormous sums they stole from their nation’s citizens.  Financial Exposure, the new book by subcommittee investigator and later staff director Elise Bean, recounts how Democrats and Republicans united not only to document egregious cases of grand corruption but to enact legislation making banks’ complicity in future cases a crime.

Americans depressed by the rancorous polarization now gripping Congress will find her book a welcome reminder that Democrats and Republicans can work together to advance the public interest.  Scandals involving money laundering by banks in other nations, most recently Denmark’s Danske Bank and Latvian bank ABLV, should prompt non-Americans to send their parliamentarians a copy of Ms Bean’s book.  Below Ms. Bean offers a few morsels from the book to whet readers’ appetites.    

There isn’t room here to recount all the subcommittee’s anti-corruption investigations, but a few examples will illustrate what they showed and what results they produced.

Citibank Private Bank.  Corruption was the subject of a key investigation by the subcommittee in 1999, which was led by then subcommittee chair Republican Senator Susan Collins of Maine. Rumors were flying then that the United States had become the preferred banker for corrupt foreign officials around the world. Working with Democratic Senator Carl Levin of Michigan (my boss), the subcommittee elected to zero in on so-called “private banks,” banking units that opened accounts only for wealthy individuals with at least $1 million in deposits.

The inquiry ended up detailing four accountholders at Citibank Private Bank: Raul Salinas, brother to the then president of Mexico; Omar Bongo, then president of Gabon; Asif Ali Zardari, then known for his marriage to Benazir Bhutto, former prime minister of Pakistan; and the sons of Sani Abacha, recently deceased president of Nigeria.  Senate hearings exposed how Citibank had not only accepted tens of millions of suspect dollars from the accountholders, but also created offshore shell companies to hide their identities, helped them secretly move millions of dollars around the globe, and continued servicing them even after learning of corruption allegations. Continue reading →

The Giving Trees: Fighting Corruption in the Timber Industry with Technology

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The 3-hour drive from the port city of Douala, Cameroon to the capital, Yaoundé, is unsettling–and not just because drivers hurtle down the road, careening around blind curves into oncoming traffic. What is more worrying is that the oncoming traffic is comprised largely of huge lorries on their way to the shipyards transporting some of the biggest trees I’ve ever seen. After passing 10-15 trucks on my first trip, I started to wonder where the trees were coming from and how they could possibly be arriving in such a steady stream. Perhaps this large-scale lumber harvesting is not by itself all that unusual. But the facts that Cameroon ranks 144/177 on Transparency International’s Corruption Perception Index, and that nearly two-thirds of these round logs leave the country destined for China–the world’s largest importer of illegally-sourced timber–raise red flags.

Indeed, illegal logging in southern Cameroon and the rest of the Congo Basin is a serious problem, contributing to the destruction of 2.5% of the world’s second largest rainforest over a single decade. Studies show that in two of Cameroon’s nearest neighbors, Gabon and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), illicit logging could account for as much as 70% of the timber market. In fact, the entire greenbelt envelops countries where corruption is rife – India, China, Brazil, Peru, Indonesia, Ethiopia, DRC, Nigeria – and the links between corruption and over-logging have been widely studied by the likes of TI, U4, UNODC, and the World Bank.

Current efforts to address poor governance of the timber industry are admirable but insufficient. The EU FLEGT Action Plan and the US Lacey Act regulate trade in wood and ban the importation of illegally sourced goods. Under the FLEGT Plan, Cameroon and the EU agreed to a licensing scheme to promote proper forest management. But no such regulation exists in China, a market that has boomed over the past 15 years largely in response to American demand for manufactured wood products. Furthermore, as the US Environmental Investigation Agency has shown in the Peruvian market, transparent trade depends on formal paperwork – export permits, certificates of origin, etc. – that are easily forged and exchanged on the black market. As a result, the same study points out, American importers often remain culpable, despite regulations.

We need a coordinated global response that can be effective independent of manipulable documents. What might this answer look like? A major component might well be the deployment of new technologies and scientific techniques to verify the origin of timber and timber products. Continue reading →