Top Tweets for #OperationORAL

1. The incoming government in Ghana wants to recover "loot" stashed somewhere by outgoing government folks. 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 international recognition of what is at stake. In 2020, the African Union issued the Addis Ababa declaration on the African Common Position on Asset Recovery. See the principles attached. 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 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 $4 billion has been uncovered and recovered globally through STAR as of 2022. Consider that the African Union estimates illegal capital flight from Africa to amount to over $150bn annually. 7. My honest view is that countries that have done well using recovery mechanisms such as Nigeria (eg. the 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 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 really rare in Ghana. 9. The forms of official looting that prevail in Ghana are more subtle and, in many cases, more 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 the schemes also alienate most citizens. 12. Hugely inflated contracts, high fiscal deficits, and the shame of becoming the first African country to witness a government default on its domestic debt, all seem intimately connected, 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 looting in Ghana makes the conventional recovery measures more suited for embezzlement harder to deploy to recover large sums of money. 14. Given how endemic the schemes 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 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 information; and 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 have to insist.