Tag: Megabanks

In this closing piece in the series that began two weeks ago, let us begin with the question with which we ended the discussion in last week’s column: How did we move from Sabo Bakin Zuwo to Sambo Dasuki? Let us recall the contents of this question. When tens of millions of naira were found in his bedroom after the coup of 1983 that terminated his incumbency in the Kano State executive governorship, Sabo informed the police detectives that since the money was “government money”, Government House was a logical place in which to stock the money. Moreover, Sabo later vehemently denounced the detectives who carted the stolen loot from his bedroom for underreporting the amount they took away from “Government House”. Last year, 2015, when millions of monies in dollars and other foreign, convertible currencies were found in Dasuki’s house, what did the former National Security Advisor to Goodluck Jonathan say? Well, we don’t know exactly what he said to the EFCC operatives that found the monies in his house; all we know is that in his place, his lawyers, a phalanx of Senior Advocates of Nigeria (SAN), have been speaking for him in the law courts. So far, these lawyers have said little or nothing about either the monies found in Dasuki’s home or the immensely vaster sums of the billions of dollars lodged in both Nigerian and foreign banks. To the contrary, Dasuki’s lawyers have been fixated on consolidating the terms of his release on bail so that he can travel out of the country for medical attention.

What points, what lessons concerning looting in the age of neoliberalism am I making in this matter of the move that we havemade in our national economy from Sabo to Dasuki? First point: compared to the monies found in Dasuki’s home in 2015, the loot found in Sabo’s house in 1983 was, as the Americans would put it, peanuts. Second point: the loot found in Sabo’s bedroom was all in naira, not in dollars or any other foreign currencies. Third point:  although Sabo’s puerile explanation of government money in Government House fooled nobody, it is significant that he found it necessary or convenient to invoke the government as the real owner of the money. Fourth point: Sabo did not speak through any lawyers, any SANs; he spoke in his own voice, as raucous and impudent as that voice was. Fifth and final point: Sabo launched a counter-offensive on the police detectives that carted the monies from his house by alleging that they, too, had stolen “government money” by not reporting the actual sum they took from his bedroom. Well, let me add a sixth point which, I admit, is mere speculation on my part: Sabo was keeping the stolen loot in his bedroom in readiness for the time when he could convert the millions of naira to foreign currencies on the black market and then have them smuggled out of the country in suitcases.

For readers under the age of forty to whom, I imagine, this whole scenario of Sabo and “government money in Government House” might seem so strange as to come from another age, another era, this was in fact how the disposition of looted monies from our national coffers typically organized at that stage of our post-independent economic history. In other words, Sabo’s case was not an exception, not an aberration: government and those who looted monies from its coffers confronted each other directly; and the government was the undisputed superior protagonist in the confrontation.As strange as it may sound now, there was a widespread or common assumption that government money did belong to the government, just as there was a belief, an expectation that “government” mattered and could and would act to protect the monies held in trust for all Nigerians. Dear reader, if you know nothing else about the extraordinary changes that neoliberalism has wrought in our country and many other countries of the world in the last four decades, please know this one particular fact: government did matter as the trustee, the guarantor of our commonweal, of the health and justness of the institutions and processes that make our collective experience as Nigerians safe, secure and dignified.

Yes, “government” very often not only often failed to deliver on these assumptions about its place in our collective existence, it was in fact sometimes turned into the very antithesis of these expectations. But these were aspects of, or enclaves within “government” – like the military and their rapacious self-serving coups; or the civilian politicians and their nepotistic political parties; or the civil services of the federation and the states in their entrenched practices of using administration to feather their own nests; or especially the police and the notorious “wetin you carry” expropriations that they tirelessly make from the already meager resources of the Nigerian masses. No, typically government has been far from perfect, in our country and indeed in most countries of the world. What neoliberalism did was to go far above and beyond the imperfections of government to more or less perpetrate a massive retrenchment or displacement of “government” in favour of something called the market or market forces. In other not to lay myself open to the charge of distorting neoliberalism in its relationship(s) to the government of our country and the governments of the nations of the planet, let me put this point in the language of neoliberalism’s own self-understanding, its own ideology: “the business of government is not business”.

Of course the apostles of neoliberalism and the warriors of its policies and programs never quite clearly come out to say that they are intent on the complete retrenchment of government. Their keywords and phrases are “privatization” and “deregulation”. Their favorite slogan is free trade devoid of so-called protectionist distortions. Their choice targets are trade unions, both public sector and private sector unions. They also do not care much, if at all, for governmental or state investment in public sector institutions, services and utilities like education; physical infrastructures like roads, highways and bridges; and human enrichment projects like health care delivery, public sanitation and waste disposal and the care of the young in state supported preschool and kindergarten programs. But dear reader, think of this crucial fact: about the only enclaves of the government from which the apostles and warriors of neoliberalism have, at least so far, not extended their mega-project of privatization and deregulation are the armed forces, the police, and the prisons. We could add the three arms of government – the executive, the judiciary and legislature – to this list, but everyone knowsthat for neoliberalism to do this, it would have to bear the cost of maintaining these institutions that, for the most part, are not income-generating “enterprises”. Moreover, neoliberalism is in its essence a global and globalizing phenomenon; it is content to leave the “business” of governance in every nation in the world to these three arms of government – the executive, the legislature and the judiciary. But with this comes what we might regard as the real cleverness, the true genius of neoliberalism: national governments are made everywhere to take a back seat to market forces. And in turn, the powerful and the wealthy control and manipulate these market forces.

Dear readers, please do not just take my words, my testimonies at their face value in these matters. Look deeply and carefully at the innumerable manifestations of these things that I say in this series in our country in the last two and half decades. Look especially at the triad of megabanks, megachurches and mega-looters that I have made the prime exemplars of neoliberalism in our country and our national economy at the present time. Each one of the three seem so strong, so impregnable that they seem to be above the Nigerian government as a national government, a government of one country and one country alone. For instance, the vast majority of Nigerians rather naively thought that the mega-looters would flee the country in their private jets with the Second Coming of Buhari, but did this happen? Have the mega-looters not stayed and fought back, in defiance of the wishes and aspirations of the Nigerian government and peoples?As for the megachurches, have we not seen how much influence, how much authority their proprietors have on politicians at home in Nigeria itself and across the whole of the West Africa region? And is the whole world not the hunting and haunting ground of these megachurches, with branches and franchises as far away as in Eastern Europe and the Asian Far East, not to talk of Western Europe and North America? Did not one of the eminencies of these megachurches boast that their intention is to have a church within five minutes of walking in every city, town and village in the developing world and within five minutes of driving in every city in the developed world?

What of the megabanks? Ah, the megabanks, great tidings of joy! Just this week, a friend from home in Nigeria visiting me in Cambridge, Massachusetts, rather proudly showed me his credit card from one of the megabanks at home that he has been able to use quite easily without any fuss in ATMS across America. As I reflected on this information, my mind went back to the 1980s around the time of Sabo Bakin Zuwo’s “government money in Government House” wahala. At that point in time when I was still teaching at Ife, if you wanted to get forex for your naira to enable you to go to conferences abroad, you had to go all the way to Lagos where you would go for approval from first, the office of the Secretary to the Federal Government; then to the Ministry of Finance; and finally to the Central Bank.In most cases, the amount did not or could not exceed $500. And of course, at that time there was nothing like domiciliary or dollar accounts in Nigerian banking. If you were desperate enough, you smuggled forex that you got by any means possible concealed somewhere on your person. Or in suitcases if you were one of the looters. In that period, that age, what is known in the jargon of neoliberal economics as “financialization”, the most important, the most dominant and hegemonic sector of contemporary global capitalism, had not yet made its way into Nigerian banks. In our closing piece in the series next week, we will start with how this came to the Nigerian banking system without the slightest beneficial impact on the poor but to the great benefit of the very wealthy, especially the mega-looters and the megachurches.

• Biodun Jeyifo bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

Has Nigeria in the last two decades either gone too far or not gone far enough in embracing neoliberalism? As I stated in the conclusion to the beginning essay in this series last week in this column, since this question does not interest me in the least, I will not address it at all in this series. However, to avoid the impression that I am avoiding the question because I have no effective response to the champions and defenders of neoliberalism in our country, let me briefly give the reason why I have chosen not to address the question. Very simply, here is the reason.

All over the world, the debates between those for and those against neoliberalism is a perpetual and never-ending debate, including the United States, the heartland of both global capitalism and its current phase of neoliberalism. Nigeria is one of the few states in the world – indeed perhaps the only state in the world – where the champions of neoliberalism feel that this crucial debate, this elemental struggle between neoliberalism and its opponents is over, and the champions of neoliberalism have won the battle. As I write these words on Friday, April 22, 2016, three of the five remaining candidates in the U.S. presidential primaries are waging a fierce battle of words and ideas against neoliberalism. These candidates are Bernie Sanders on the Left, Hillary Clinton at the Center and Donald Trump on the Right. In varying degrees of passion and varied ideological hues, all three are vigorously challenging fundamental policy and ideological postulates of the free trade agreements that the U.S., in its moment of unbridled neoliberalism, imposed on itself and the rest of the world. In other words, economic nationalism, in form of ideas pertaining to protectionism and regulation, the double-headed ultimate nemesis of neoliberalism, is making its way back into the mainstream of American debates about the economic fate of the country in general and in particular, the hardship and suffering of the majority of Americans.

I do not make reference to this important feature of the current U.S. presidential primaries to imply that if the Americans are at last challenging the central ideas of neoliberalism, this should serve as a legitimating catalyst for us in Nigeria and the rest of the world to begin to question neoliberalism. The premise of my arguments in this series goes much deeper than that and it is this: from its inception in the mid to late 1970s, neoliberalism has faced fierce opposition everywhere in the world, Europe, America and Japan included. On this account, what we are seeing now in the U.S. presidential primaries is no more and no less an indication that the U.S. is at last catching up with the rest of the world in the sustained and fundamental critique of neoliberalism that is at the heart of the economic history of the world in the last half century. And this is happening in America right now because at last, the issue is being raised as to who has benefitted enormously and who has suffered unconscionably in the wake of the world hegemony of neoliberalism.

Nasir El Rufai, articulate and zealous apostle of neoliberalism, unwavering champion of complete privatization of all our public or state-owned enterprises especially the NNPC, are you listening, are you reading these words? Neoliberalism, the late 20th and early 21st century version of mid-19th centurylaissezfairecapitalism, has created unprecedented levels of growth around the world, but only on the basis of the greatest economic inequality in modern history wherein a tiny minority of the populations of the nations of the world grow enormously wealthy while the rest of the population in nearly every country in the world sink more and more into poverty and destitution. This is why I am completely uninterested in whether we have fully embraced neoliberalism or not gone far enough. The central issue is and has always been who gains, who loses; whose bellies are full to bursting and whose bellies are bloated because of the kwashiorkor political economy of the criminal justice system as it pertains to the prosecution of mega-looters in Nigeria.

Dear reader, what I am arguing here may be unusual, but it is easily demonstrated and it is this: neoliberalism is at the heart of the looting of our national coffers on the scale in which we have seen it in so many unbelievable cases but particularly incases like the oil subsidy mega-scam of 2010 and Dasukigate of 2015, cases that posed grave threats to the survival of the nation. In the oil subsidy mega-scam, the sums involved were much bigger than the total amount in the nation’s budget for the year in question. In the Dasukigate mega-scam, the sums were diverted from their intended, budgeted use: procurement of arms for the army in the war against the Boko Haram insurgency. In the oil subsidy case, not a kobo of the stolen loot has been recovered and no one has been penalized for the crimes. And with regard to Dasukigate (and all the other fresh cases currently being tried in the law courts), we are seeing the incredible spectacle of the prosecution and the entire country being forced into lame, defensive positions as lawyers, magistrates, judges and pundits mount arguments and devise tactics and strategies rooted in the Nigerian legal superstructure and its institutions in support of the rights of the looters. Welcome to looting in the age of neoliberalism!

Of course, this is not to say that large-scale looting, and more generally miasmic corruption, started with the inception of neoliberalism. That is not the case. Looting is as old as human social and economic history itself; and corruption is endemic to basic moral failings of humankind that will always be with us as a species. But the scale and kindof the looting of our collective wealth that we are dealing with now in the law courts in Nigeria is nothing but the underside of the freewheeling, deregulated (or indeedunregulated) brand of capitalism that neoliberalism brought into being. Against this historic backdrop, there are three things to bear in mind with regard to looting in the age of neoliberalism: first, it must be pitched at a colossal scale, dwarfing all “normal” or previous levels of looting in the country and the world; secondly, it must be unregulated or indeed be unregulatable; thirdly and finally, starting from Nigeria but going far beyond the borders of the country, it must be able to travel around the globe, traversing all the economic regions and currency zones of the planet. Let us look briefly at these fundamental preconditions of looting in the age of neoliberalism as they apply to Nigeria at the present time. As we do this, please bear in mind, dear reader, that neoliberalism does well what it is meant to do around the world because of the massive institutional and moral distortions it brings into being in the public affairs of nearly all the nations of the world.

Mega-looting in our country as the product of a (falsely) triumphant neoliberalism would have been impossible without the introduction of interlocutory injunctions and stay of proceedings into the administration of the criminal justice systemin Nigeria. As I have remarked countless number of times in this column,we are the only country in the world where this takes place; in all other countries in the world, interlocutory injunctions are applied only to civil cases. To this observation, I now wish to add two new observations that take us into the heart of neoliberalism. First, the diversion of interlocutory injunctions from its exclusive and normative restriction to civil cases to extensive application inthe criminal justice system in our country is an extremely costly affair; money changes hands on a colossal level, in both local and foreign currencies. Secondly, this in effect means that the loot must be big, it must of necessity be super-scale, for there are many SANs, many magistrates and many judges to “settle”. To these now add the following element and the circle of the neoliberal paradise enjoyed by Nigerian mega-looters and those who live on surplus extraction from their loot is complete: the megabanks must be there and willing to move the stolen loot around the capital markets and safe havens of the financial services industries of the world. Stolen loot in Nigeria used to be moved around throughthe smuggling of suitcases packed with foreign currencies into and out of the country. But that was before the global ascendancy of neoliberalism with its central dependence on megabanks that are able to electronically move billions and trillions of financial capital around the world.

Of course, allegedly, hundreds of thousands of foreign currencies of diverse denominations were found in Sambo Dasuki’s house in Abuja. But this is not comparable at all to an earlier time when the same kind of loot was found in the home of former Kano State Governor, the late Sabo Bakin Zuwo, of laconically comicand sardonic memory. To the police detectives who found the loot in his bedroom, Sabo was alleged to have said with deadpan composure: “What you find here is government money; where else do you expect to find government money if not in Government House”? We have come a long way from Sabo to Dasuki. The space between them is marked by the movement from a time, an age when local and national priorities still mattered, still mediated market forces to the present neoliberal age in which these same local and national priorities have become very tough to defend and sustain against looters who, in contrast to what many Nigerians naively expected, did not run away in their private jets in the wake of Buhari’s Second Coming, looters who indeed stayed and are fighting back, aided by seemingly invincible forces within and outside the judiciary. How this movement was consummated will the starting point in next week’s continuation of this series.

Biodun Jeyifo                                                                                                                            bjeyifo@fas.harvard.

I readily admit it: the series of essays that begin with this week’s column was instigated by the subject that has consistently dominated my writings in the column in the last two to three months. As every regular reader of the column knows, this subject is the current war being waged in the law courts by the Buhari administration against alleged mega-looters of our national treasury. Readers who may have noticed my increasing frustration at the totally inept manner in which the administration, specifically AGF Malami, is waging the legal battles are right in that perception. As a matter of fact, last week’s column in which I addressed an open letter to AGF Malami was a sort of turning point, marked by my declaration at the end of the piece that for the next six months, I would not be addressing this matter at all in this column. But this does not mean that I am done with the mega-looters and the destructive effect that they have had – and continue to have – on our collective existence as a nation. For the simple fact is that the law courts in which they are being tried – and fighting back powerfully against an inept adversary – is not the only theatre of their operations, their massive impact on our lives and the lives of those who will come after us. This, indeed, is the huge subject that I begin exploring in a series that begins with this week’s column. In this series of about three essays altogether, I will counterintuitively be exploring links between mega-looters, megabanks and megachurches as essential aspects of the current historic phase of global capitalism in all itshemispheric, regional and national formations:neoliberalism. Not to prematurely reveal the conclusions in this opening essay in the series, I will be arguing that much of what we find supremely shocking and objectionable in the unpatriotic acts of the alleged mega-looters comes from – and could only have come from – massive institutional and moral distortions ofneoliberalism on economy, polity and society in our country in about the last two decades.

Dear reader, do not be intimidated by the high sounding tone or the abstract ring of this term, “neoliberalism”, a term that on my insistence links mega-looters with megabanks and megachurches. At the risk of oversimplifying things, here’s a quick, everyman’s and everywoman’s definition of “neoliberalism”: in a world that has become enormously interconnected in economic and commercial affairs, all local, national and regional interests and priorities must give way to market forces that should, as much as possible, be free of regulations and regulators.Here is one crucial additional element to that basic definition, offered to help the common man and woman to understand what neoliberalism really means: government, all the governments of the world, must remove themselves from tampering with market forces, since, as the golden adage that underpins neoliberalism puts it, “the business of government is not business”.Indeed, this particular dimension of neoliberalism that seeks to completely remove government or the public sector from “interfering” with business is the key to understanding the otherwise surprising or even enigmatic use of the suffix, “liberalism” in the term “neoliberalism”: once you remove or massively reduce the role of government in regulating business, the field of play for business becomes “liberal”;it becomes gloriously free for business to operate everywhere in the world. Thus, while neoliberalism is actually not liberal, while it actually seeks to prevent the governments of this world from liberally spreading the economic and financial dividends of capitalist production to the majority of the populations and citizens of the nations of the planet, it has appropriated the term “liberalism” merely because market forces and businesses can move freely and “liberally” around the world andaround all the spheres of the planet’s national economies. These include the spheres of production in public,private,collectivist,non-profit and non-capitalist enterprises, including and especially enterprises in the domain of religion, faith and spirituality.

As a matter of fact, for all who may be confused or bemused by the term neoliberalism, I suggest that perhaps the best way to get an angle on what it means and how it operates is to look at the profile of the big, enormously wealthy megachurches of our country for a grasp of what we confront in this new, historic phase of global capitalism. For who does not know that our Nigerian megachurches, while being quite obviously and even aggressively profit-generating enterprises, are completely free of regulation – except perhaps by God. Moreover, the most successful among them operate transnationally, far beyond the borders of Nigeria. Please remember that neoliberalism is capitalism without and beyond borders, putatively owing no allegiance, no fealty to any nation on the planet. Above all else, please consider this fact: just as neoliberalism makes the vast majority of the peoples of the planet poor and marginalized, in every country in Africa and the world to which our megachurches have successfully transplanted themselves and found hundreds of thousands of fervent followers, only the clergy and a sprinkling of middle class parishioners are economically and socially secure; the vast majority of the congregants are poor and downtrodden.

Unquestionably, the complex moral equation responsible for the looted lives in these megachurches is different from the morality that produces the looted lives of tens of millions impoverished by the looting of our national treasury. In plain language, I would be the last person to suggest that Dasukigate is a mirror image of the kind of surplus extraction that goes on in our megachurches. Whatever one may think or say about the commercialization of religiosity that powers faith and worship in our megachurches, it is nothing like treating the Central Bank as a gigantic ATM machine – as Dasuki did in his diversion of billions of dollars intended for arms procurement for the army for the benefit of himself and his uncountable partners in crime. This important qualification being duly acknowledged, there is nonetheless a common structural dimension between what, on the one hand, looters of the nation do and what, on the other hand,”looters” of the soul in the megachurches do. This is where the megabanks come into the discussion, for the simple fact that they are the linchpin, the glue that holds all the operations of neoliberalism together in our world. In other words, there would be no megachurches and no mega-looters without the megabanks, precisely because the megabanks are the structural and institutional foundations of neoliberalism as the current reigning formation of global capitalism. Permit me to draw the reader’s attention to some obvious but easily ignored facts that give compelling evidence for the structural links between mega-looters, megachurches and megabanks in the Nigerian experience of neoliberalism.

I think it is widely known that our megabanks and megachurches are the only successful multinational or transnational enterprises that we have in Nigeria, with perhaps the single exception of the Dangote business empire. For one reason or another, in all other spheres of economic and financial activities, our business enterprises have found it tough if not downright impossible to compete at the global level, even at the level of the continental Africa region. But in the megachurches and the megabanks, Nigeria has been as successful as South Africa, the home base of most of the most notable African multinational corporations. This much is widely known. But what is not well known or known but not much appreciated,is the fact that Nigerian megabanks and megachurches went global and became transnationally successful not only around the same time but on the basis of joint and intimate collaboration between the two. I confess that this fact was first brought to my notice in Ghana and by Ghanaians. During many visits that I made to the country about a decade ago, I constantly came across discussions in which the uneasy conversations revolved around the presence of many Nigerian-owned banks and Pentecostal churches in the country, the unmistakable suggestion being that there was a link between the two, especially in their dominance over Ghanaian churches and, yes, Ghanaian banks.Significantly, the uneasiness of the conversations had to do with the support, the solidarity that the Ghanaians I talked with expressed for branches ofNigerian megachurches in Ghana that had broken away from the Nigerian headquarters or “mother” churches. As a matter of fact, it was a difficult task for me to disabuse my Ghanaian interlocutors of their conviction that the Nigerian megabanks and megachurches did not come together to Ghana in a secret but tightly knit collaboration to enable both to lord it over Ghanaians, one in the domain of the spirit and the other in material economic affairs. In almost every instance of such incidents, the first thing the breakaway Ghanaian branches of Nigerian megachurches did was to open new accounts in Ghanaian banks and stop paying expected “franchise fees” to the branches of Nigerian megabanks in Ghana.

In making the observations and reflections in this piece, I have not been unaware of the fact that neoliberalism has many articulate and thoughtful defenders in Nigeria. For such people, with the exception of my bringingthe case of the mega-looters into the discussion, nearly everything that I have said in this piece could be turned around and used as an argument in favor of neoliberalism. For instance, the emergence of Nigerian based or owned megabanks as vigorous players in continental African and global financial services industries is a great plus, an exceptional dimension of a general movement into the ranks of the big league of the world’s biggest national economies. As a matter of fact, for these ideological and journalistic defenders of neoliberalism, the essential problem with neoliberalism in our country is not that it wholeheartedly adopted neoliberalism about two decades ago; rather, it is their belief that Nigeria did not then embrace – and up till now has not fully adopted – neoliberalism in full, without equivocations. For such people, the ultimate “proof” of their argument that we have not truly and fully embraced neoliberalism enough is built on three major claims: one, that oil subsidies should go once for all, never to be reinstated; two: that we should completely sell off and privatize all national and public assets and resources; three: that we should once and for all stop artificially propping up the naira as our national currency and let it find its “true” (devalued) value in the marketplace of transnational, global currency exchange.

In next week’s continuation of this series, I will engage these claims of the ideological defenders of neoliberalism, not with a view to either refute or confirm their contentions, but to take the discussion to domains they never, never go wherein we can see who has illegally and immorally benefitted and who has suffered unjustly and unconscionably when the Nigerian political class, with very few exceptions, went neoliberal and abandoned alternative modes of truly liberal modes and forms of both capitalist and non-capitalist  economic and political organization of our country and society.

Biodun Jeyifo                                                                                                                   bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu