....and Dirty Africa may get a bum rap but loses high ground for accepting donations, writes Michael Schmidt

Corruption is all too often seen as inherently African, a prejudice frequently used as a stick to beat the continent. But the reality is far different from this perception.

The United Nations and World Bank stolen asset recovery (StAR) initiatives have fingered just two of the world's 10 worst embezzlers of public funds as African: the DRC's Mobutu Sese Seko and Nigeria's Sani Abacha.

Yet the problem of graft in Africa remains extreme. An estimated 25% of the gross domestic product (GDP) of African states, about $148-billion (R1-trillion), is lost every year to corruption.

This corruption includes "petty bribe-taking done by low-level government officials, inflated procurement contracts, kickbacks, and raiding the public treasury as part of public asset theft by political leaders".

Zimbabwe's Robert Mugabe is apparently such a small-timer that he is dwarfed in the looting stakes by the Philippines' Ferdinand Marcos and Joseph Estrada, Serbia's Slobodan Milosevic, Haiti's Jean-Claude "Baby Doc" Duvalier, Peru's Alberto Fujimori, Ukraine's Pavlo Lazarenko and Nicaragua's Arnoldo Alemán.

And two who made the top 10 rogues gallery, Abacha and Indonesia's Suharto, were major funders of the African National Congress - as well as monstrous human rights abusers.

Compiled in June, but only now released to the public, the StAR report underlines the "staggering magnitude" of assets stolen just by corrupt heads of state. But the report also notes that the true cost of corruption far exceeds even these amounts.

"This would include the degradation of public institutions, especially those involved in public financial management and financial sector governance, the weakening if not destruction of the private investment climate, and the corruption of social service delivery mechanisms for basic health and education programmes, with a particularly adverse impact on the poor.

"This 'collateral damage' in terms of forgone growth and poverty alleviation will be proportional to the duration of the tenure of the corrupt leader."

But the StAR report goes further, saying that while "the traditional focus of the international development community has been on addressing corruption and weak governance within developing countries themselves, this approach ignores the 'other side of the equation'," - the fact that "stolen assets are often hidden in the financial centres of developed countries".

An example that springs to mind was "the other arms deal", a story broken by the Saturday Star in April 2005 in which it was revealed that state arms manufacturer Denel paid a shadowy company, Varas Associates, based in the British Virgin Islands, about $1-million for unspecified "technical services" apparently related to Denel's sale to India of 200 heavy anti-materiél rifles.

The story provoked such outrage in India that both its houses of parliament were shut early amid scenes of chaos, and all Indian arms deals with South Africa were frozen.

Both the Scorpions and the Indian authorities launched probes into Varas Associates.

The StAR initiative report goes on to say that the "other side of the equation" includes "bribes to public officials from developing countries that often originate from multinational corporations".

Here it is not necessary to look any further than testimony in Schabir Shaik's trial in 2004 from Susan Delique, the former secretary to Alain Thetard, the local director of French arms firm Thompson CSF (now Thint).

Delique testified that her boss had expressed surprise that the allegation of bribery was being taken seriously in SA, indicating that he thought bribery was simply the way business was done in Africa.

The matter remains relevant because Thint, whose name is synonymous with the country's arms deal scandal, is still trying to sell its radar systems to SA - and because it was on Delique's computer that a copy of the contested "Jacob Zuma R500 000-a-year bribe deal" was found.

Bribery by African public officials is so severe - estimated at $20-billion to $40-billion annually - that it is equivalent to between 20% and 40% of development aid, the report said, quoting Transparency International's 2001 report on corruption in 11 African countries.

On the flipside of Third World corruption, the StAR report noted, "the intermediary services provided by lawyers, accountants and company formation agents, which could be used to launder or hide the proceeds of asset theft by developing-country rulers, are often located in developed-country financial centres".

This laundering usually also involves money derived from drug trafficking, arms dealing, human slavery, unrecorded oil and diamond sales, counterfeit goods, tax evasion, as well as bribery, extortion, fraud and embezzlement.

Roughly half the R10,9-trillion laundered each year comes from developing and transitional economies.

StAR estimates that the funds stolen by Sese Seko, the US-backed kleptocrat who ruled the then named Zaire between 1965 and 1997 before being ousted by rebel forces, at about $5-billion, putting him in third-worst position.

The late Abacha comes in a close fourth on the list, having managed to filch between $2-billion and $5-billion during his five-year tenure as military dictator of oil-rich Nigeria in the early 1990s.

But by far the world's worst embezzler is General Suharto, the right-wing dictator who ruled Indonesia with an iron fist from 1967 to 1991.

Suharto is estimated to have stolen a staggering $15-billion to $35-billion.

What should make both Abacha and Suharto's corruption rankings sit uneasily with all South Africans is that both were major bankrollers of the ANC - to a degree that puts the Myanmar junta-funding of Gary Player's business associate Serge Pun in the shade.

Writing in London's The Guardian newspaper, David Beresford claimed Abacha had in 1994 donated £2,6-million (R35,7-million) to the ANC, with The News of Lagos reporting the following year that Abacha donated another $50-million.

This is despite Abacha's bleak human rights record, being responsible for the execution in 1995 after a rigged trial of world-famous writer Ken Saro-Wiwa and eight other Ogoni activists, for the suppression of free speech and association, and for the charging in absentia of writer Wole Soyinka - a virulent opponent of graft in Africa - with treason.

Suharto cuts an even more malevolent figure than Abacha. When Suharto assumed power in the period 1965-1967, his armed forces and allied panga-wielding militia were unleashed in a paroxysm of bloodletting akin to Pol Pot's murderous Khmer Rouge.

Acting on CIA-supplied death lists of some 10 000 members of the legal, parliamentary Indonesian Communist Party, they slaughtered at least a million communists, suspected fellow travellers and ethnic Chinese, with rivers in some provinces clogged by the corpses of entire families.

Suharto's "New Order" regime had distinctly fascist overtones and suppressed the media, trade unions and social organisations.

And yet Suharto is believed to have donated $60-million to the ANC, though the party admits only that he "gave generously".

In recognition of this, and in what must surely rate one of the most shameful episodes in recent history, then president Nelson Mandela on July 22 1997 awarded Suharto South Africa's then-highest decoration, the Order of Good Hope.

After Abacha's death in 1999, $800-million was recovered from his family, while Swiss banks finally repatriated about $505,5-million of Abacha's stolen loot to Nigeria between 2005 and 2006.

For every $100-million that StAR is able to recapture from the embezzlers' bank accounts and sink back into African economies, they could, for example, provide full anti-malarial immunisation for 4-million children, or a year's antiretrovirals for about 600 000 people living with HIV/Aids.

With acknowledgements to Michael Schmidt  and The Star.