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Africa is a rich continent - one that boasts (maybe not literally anymore) of enormous natural resource wealth.

Two thirds of the world’s cocoa crop is supplied by West Africa alone (Ivory Coast, Ghana, Nigeria, Cameroon and Togo); South Africa and Ghana have for the longest time remained leading world producers of gold and a remarkable number of African countries (Angola, Nigeria, Algeria, Egypt, Libya, Equatorial Guinea, Sudan, Congo, Gabon, South Africa, Ghana etc.) together, contribute significant barrels to world oil production.

According to the International Energy Agency, the remaining recoverable resources of oil in sub-Saharan Africa is sufficient for another 100 years at the current level of production. The list of Africa’s resource wealth is tall, and any attempt to give a full account of this will be to bore my reader with fact that is beyond contest.

The other equally uncontestable fact is that majority of the African people are poor. The African people come face to face with the bitter challenges and sad truth of poverty on a daily basis.

In sub-Saharan Africa, more than 389 million people live in extreme poverty. The World Bank reports that 1 in 10 people in the world live under $ 1.90 a day, and half of the extreme poor live in sub-Saharan Africa.

Africa’s poor are predominantly rural, where education and healthcare remain elusive hopes, and where potable drinking water is still a pie in the sky. Ignorance, poverty and disease continue to be Africa’s bane, destroying her people in ways that are by any measure intolerable in the 21st Century. 

But if Africa is rich and her people are generally poor, then the problem begs a fundamental question: what use is Africa’s wealth put and to whose benefit? The answer to that question may not be straightforward or easy, but it is fairly easy to place corruption at the heart of any response that is given from any realistic statistic.

Corruption connects with poverty in many ways. It stagnates economic growth and inhibits the development of a society’s people. In Africa, corruption shows its ugly head in two main ways.

First, it subsists as an unwritten rule, particularly in the public sector, to enable actors in that space to overcome the bureaucracy of stringent and inflexible procedures and written laws.

This unwritten rule is so widespread in Africa that it is no longer seen as a wrongdoing. Sadly, that illegitimate righting of wrong continues to contribute significantly to the inefficiency of Africa’s public service, hurting productivity in the process.

Undoubtedly, this has a real and direct effect on the limping character of Africa’s economies. From a deliberate suffocation of procurement laws through overpricing of projects to the payment of kickbacks, Africa’s economies continue to bleed very heavily as a result of corrupt activity in the public sector.

Secondly, corruption manifests itself in Africa by what I call ‘crony-parasitism’. Operating in a not so sophisticated way, African leaders shamelessly put their friends and relatives in positions and places that command the highest proportions of a nation’s wealth, with a singular concerted object of syphoning directly and taking permanently most of such wealth. The evidence shows without a doubt that African leaders have achieved unforgivable success in this regard.

Following his death in 1998, Forbes reports that the Nigerian government uncovered over $3 billion held in Sani Abacha’s personal and proxy bank accounts in tax havens in Switzerland, Luxembourg, Jersey and Liechtenstein, and a further $1.3 billion was recovered by the government after a series of hectic negotiations with the former military ruler’s family.

Over his 30-year reign as ruler of the Democratic Republic of Congo, Mobutu Sese Seko amassed an incredible fortune estimated by various sources (including Transparency International) at somewhere between $1 billion and $5 billion. A man of extremely humble beginnings will come to live a very affluent life, developing an exceptional taste for pink champagne and flying fresh cakes from Paris for his personal consumption.

Kenya’s former President, Arap Moi, diverted about a billion dollars from the country’s resources to family-owned bank accounts and private estates across the world using a web of shell companies and secret trusts.

Then there is President Teodoro Obiang of Equatorial Guinea, who in 2006, Forbes estimated to be worth $600 million, which was by the way a decade ago. His eldest son, who is known internationally for his very expensive lifestyle, owns a $10 million car collection, a $30 million Malibu mansion, a $38.5 million Gulfstream jet and $2 million of Michael Jackson memorabilia.

South Africa’s President, Jacob Zuma is rumoured to have a net worth of about $20 million, a fortune largely made by being actively involved in the politics of South Africa and as President.

The list goes on, but the point is by now sufficiently made. Ibrahim Babangida though, hoarded so much of Nigeria’s wealth that he deserves a feature. The former military ruler is believed to have laundered some $12 billion earned from an oil windfall during the 1992 Gulf War.

Meanwhile, the United Nations reports that 64% of Nigerians today live in poverty, making it one of the poorest and unequal countries in the world. In Africa’s oil-rich and most populous country, 37% of children under five years old are stunted, 18% wasted, 29% are underweight and only 10% of children under two years are fed appropriately based on recommended infant and young children feeding practices. While 42% of Nigeria’s youth are unemployed, a scarier figure of 10 million children of school going age have not stepped foot in a classroom.

Large populations of the Kenyan people live in extreme poverty with two thirds of the people in Kenya’s capital city of Nairobi living in slums. One million children of school going age are sadly out of school in East Africa’s shining star; the one we call “the cradle of humanity”.

DR Congo should not surprise anyone. In spite of its immense resource wealth, poverty is what defines the way children and adults live. With fighting induced mainly by the country’s mineral resources, that beautiful African country has seen what has been called “Africa’s world war.”

Corruption and poverty continue to plaque Equatorial Guinea. With vast oil revenues and a relatively small population of about 700,000 people, who would have guessed that half of the people will lack access to clean water, or that 35% of children will be stunted and malnourished?

 The story is no different, sad as it is, in several other African countries. Education, which in my mind is the surest and most durable bridge between Africa’s rich and poor, continues to be too expensive for the poor to afford. Healthcare –and I am not even talking about quality- is still out of reach for the majority of the African people in need of it. Youth unemployment in Africa is so common and notorious it hardly needs any statistical backing.

Africa’s poor living standards make it extremely difficult to understand why corruption continues to be prevalent at the top. Or is it the other way round? It is needless to debate that question further, so long as it remains uncontested that corruption is a significant contributor to Africa’s rather sad story. Our collective focus, then, should be the way out of it.

National Constitutions in Africa gift too much power to the executive. This is not surprising, given how most African nations made the transition from military rule to multi-party democracy. What is surprising however, is how the legislature and judiciary look on for such excessive power to be in the hands of the executive. African Constitutions, and their judicial interpretation too, must evolve to take away some of the ‘appointing powers’ of presidents. The evidence shows that many presidential appointees do no more than tow the president’s line. In Ghana, an Attorney General was relieved of his position because he tried to bring members of the ruling government to book for alleged acts of corruption.

If corruption is to be fought successfully, then it must be punished effectively. African Constitutions must decouple the positions of Attorney General and Minister of Justice. Africa needs strong, independent and incorruptible Attorney General Departments committed and devoted to punishing acts of corruption, regardless of political party affiliations. Such appointments too must be independent of the president. Impeaching a sitting president for example, for acts of corruption, must not continue to be an abomination in Africa.

We must strengthen public institutions to ensure greater transparency and openness in government spending. That way, procurement laws will work to reduce corruption and increase productivity, government subsidies and tax exemptions will no longer be top secrets and governments will be more responsible and realistic in making budgetary allocations.

The more transparent these processes, the less possible it is for government officials to divert national resources. We must have in Africa separate institutions reserved for coordinating all other government institutions with the aim to ensuring transparency and accountability to the people.

We must pay our civil servants well. If it is accepted that building strong institutions is a definite path to fighting corruption in Africa, then we cannot continue to pay the people that man such institutions such low wages. We must take away anything that causes civil servants to look elsewhere to supplement their low wages.

We must cut red tapes, even if it means doing away with some of our laws. We still have on our books too many stale laws and procedures that make it too difficult to get very simple things as registration of a company or business done or acquiring certificates and licenses to operate legally in a jurisdiction. It encourages bribery and at the same time affects productivity and revenue.

Among the institutions that must work in Africa are those in charge of national elections. We must take the appointment of members of our electoral commissions out of the hands of our presidents, even if it means amending national Constitutions and any related Regulations. African leaders must no longer be propelled to office by widespread electoral malpractices largely orchestrated by institutions in charge of such elections. I don’t see any other reason why people will travel any length to steal elections, if it is not the national cake that they cannot take their eyes off.

A twin duty immediately arises out of the above, and it rests firmly on the shoulders of the electorate. African elections must mean to all of us more than just taking money from candidates and their agents to vote for them. We must ask hard questions of the people who seek our mandate to lead us and we must demonstrate a willingness to vote for persons according to their commitment to the issues that affect us everyday.

Democracy means a lot more than its mere rhetoric species that we see in most parts of Africa. Africa’s growth is tied in many ways to the establishment of free, strong, fair and independent institutions. Much of Africa’s problems, so runs my thought, will go away if we have a blossoming democracy held together by a thriving rule of law, good governance, transparency and accountability, equality and a collective commitment to the common good.

Much of that too remains with Africa’s young people. Africa’s youth must lead a new paradigm of politics and leadership. We must show ourselves credible and competent to participate in national affairs and we must contribute to making and shaping national policies.

Africa’s youth must demonstrate a collective resolve to shun the many corrupt and wicked practices that have sadly become widely accepted as the norm, because whether we like it or not, and whether today or tomorrow, leading Africa would come to be in the hands of those called youth today and it would be the most devastating of all the commentaries if we showed no positive difference.