This paper explores the reasons why African leaders in quasi-democratic regimes1 (Bongo’s Gabon, Biya’s Cameroon, Chiluba’s Zambia, Muluzi’s Malawi, Moi’s Kenya, Mugabe's Zimbabwe etc.) have used their political position to embezzle economic resources – a process which often involves the mass pauperisation of their ‘subjects’ and the deepening of their dependence on the patrimonial favours of the ‘ruler’. The paper seeks to understand the motivation of extreme corruption defined both in terms of involving large amounts – such as the billions of dollars taken by Sani Abacha (which continues to be lodged in a UK bank) – and systemically, where embezzlement becomes the strategic essence of governance. Where extreme corruption is systemic, it also involves deliberate measures to undermine the financial basis of oppositional political groups thereby reducing their adversarial potential. Clearly, financial power translates into functional political power, thus perpetuating the domination of the political party to which the corrupt leaders belong.
A closer inspection of the behaviour of rulers in extremely corrupt regimes (and this does not apply solely to Africa) shows that the motivation for graft is the maintenance of political office in the first instance, rather than personal consumption. Given the excesses associated with political leaders they become driven by the instinct of self-preservation to widen disparities in financial power between themselves and the opposition. As a consequence, in extremely corrupt regimes national budgets are reduced to a degree which prompts a wide-ranging and destructive collapse of wealth-creating institutions.
This paper uses the technique of allusion to examine corruption as a political weapon in quasi-democracies since this venal phenomenon is methodologically and empirically difficult to capture (most underhand deals are struck behind thick veils of secrecy).
In his 1957 inaugural address to the newly independent state of Ghana, Kwame Nkrumah cited corruption as a vice that risked gravely harming millions in Africa striving for freedom and justice (Nkrumah, 1961:110). Three years later, when Tanzania was edging closer towards political independence, Julius Nyerere went even further, arguing that Tanzania (then Tanganyika) risked adding another, potentially greater enemy to its list of the three often-cited enemies: poverty, ignorance, and disease – that of corruption. For people to have absolute confidence in their government, Nyerere declared, it would be paramount to ensure that taxes raised were properly spent in waging war against these four enemies (Nyerere, 1966:82). Nyerere contended that corruption was a greater enemy to the welfare of the people and ‘… should be treated in almost the same way as you treat treason’(Ibid.). He even questioned whether people could reap the true benefits of independence if corruption was allowed to continue and added that ‘people’s confidence in their government, including the very foundations of justice, would be shattered if this evil were not confronted in all its diversity.’
Several decades later, the worst fears of both Nkrumah and Nyerere seem to have been confirmed. Since independence, rulers in many African states have been exploiting public institutions and government-controlled agencies (and the public resources at their disposal) to distribute rewards and exact punishment in the exercise of political power. To a significant extent, practices of patronage and paternalism have been employed to secure and maintain unassailable control at the helm of national affairs, with totalitarian tendencies becoming the defining characteristics of most leadership forms in Africa. Political leaders in Africa, driven by the logic of self-preservation, have exploited for themselves avenues for rapid accumulation, on the one hand, and effective means of political and financial emasculation of their political enemies, on the other. Within this logic, a fundamental component driving the dynamics of political control and economic domination has been the pull of tribal loyalties in the calculus of both the rulers and the ruled. And in this interplay, the state became the central medium used by rulers in the pursuit of unspoken agendas, in seeking narrow developmental goals, and in striving for political continuity.
This paper first, explores the historical context of corruption in Africa. Second, discusses the theme of embezzlement of public resources using a model of budgetary capture – how corrupt rulers are able to target national budgets to accelerate the pace of rapid personal enrichment. Finally, it conceptualises these events within a political theory of embezzlement. Cases of corruption, for instance, are based on circumstantial evidence. Indeed, most corrupt acts are committed furtively and under thick shrouds of secrecy, so much so that conclusive incriminating evidence is rare.
Given the sensitive nature of corruption, and the personal risk to those exposing it,2 the technique of allusion is, in my mind, a preferable instrument to the technique of enumeration and illustration, though the latter will be invoked from time to time.
The historical context of corruption
In his highly acclaimed US television series, The Africans, Professor Ali Mazrui narrates a story about a superior telling a young auditor in a newly independent Ghana ‘that Kwame Nkrumah had just killed an elephant (i.e. colonial state) and that there was enough for everybody to chop (emphasis mine)’. In this metaphor, the economic state, likened to an elephant that the colonialists had fed on and selfishly barricaded from the Africans, had just been massacred and was invitingly awaiting opportunistic spoliation. Moreover, the phraseology creates the impression that the state was not an integral part of the new order and its people, but an alien force that had all along appeared distant elusive, and tangibly remote. Now that Nkrumah had managed to kill this apparently inaccessible beast, the politically liberated could partake of it. And the fact that the wild beast, i.e. the state, retained its non-integral aura among the colonially free citizens made it fair game all the more. This illustrates a process of informal socialisation of state property, common to corrupt states in Africa where the perception is not of state property belonging to the people as a whole, but as being at the personal, and inexhaustible, disposal of politicians.
Thus, one of the economically lethal legacies of colonialism in Africa has been the perception among the governed in the post-independence era that the state and its resources belong to, if anyone, a force alien from them. For example, in many parts of East and Central Africa, when employees misusing state resources are casually asked why they are acting the way they are, the stock answer has invariably been that the damage suffered to state property should concern no one since the resources belong to the government. (Such comments are usually blurted out in a dismissive manner, and are often accompanied by a swiping gesture of the hand).
This ingrained perception of the state being a force apart equates profoundly with the view held by many free riders that ‘open access’ resources, generally referred to as the ‘commons’, belong to no one and are, therefore, fair game to all. Within this view, the state is seen as a public good characterised by the properties of non-rival consumption and non-excludability. Clearly, this ‘cognitive failure’ has been responsible for the economic ruin of states just as ‘market failure’ has led to the destructive degradation of environmental systems. Indeed, graft in Africa has been widespread partly because the wider public has not been socialised into believing that it organically enjoys specific property rights over the state, only those with‘open access’. Bereft of this outlook, many citizens have, as free riders, contributed to the ‘tragedy of the state’, a phenomenon akin to what Garret Hardin (1968) called the Tragedy of the Commons in the context of adverse changes afflicting open access environmental systems.
Thus, the experience of colonialism led the African masses to, correctly, view colonial state institutions as forces of usurpation of African resources. It generated the mentality that the state, and all the material resources at its disposal, belonged to ‘another’, and it was in this context that systemic corruption began. As Williams observes:
… corruption is the product of wider historical, political and economic processes … If corruption is integral to rather than an appendage of African public life, it can only be properly comprehended within a broader understanding of the character of political and economic activity in Africa (1987:7).
The culture of corruption also took hold in the civil service and within parastatals of many post-independent countries, where nepotism was rife in appointments, with those in authority employing their kith and kin as well as people hailing from their villages. So widespread was the culture of patronage and clientelism that the values of transparency and accountability had no place in the evolving political situation. In all these acts of nepotism involving employment, state resources were being expended to achieve narrow tribal and private interests.
It is in this regard that the issue of growing illicit use of public assets by extremely corrupt leaders in a bid to shield themselves from the machinations of rivals or political enemies needs to be understood. The pressure to meet the demands (for example, employment or a school place) of tribal members and village neighbours, tended to intensify their tribal consciousness. This inward disposition, by leaders and bureaucrats across the tribal divides, began to increasingly assume a profoundly partisan and political character. The idea that there is ‘strength and safety in tribal numbers’ suddenly acquired a strategic meaning in societies that invariably have been multi-tribal in composition. Such a rationalisation, inspired by the logic of self-preservation, nudged those in power to pursue courses of action that strengthened tendencies of tribal coagulation3 at the expense of non-members. To fortify themselves, the leaders resorted to corruption as a convenient device to appropriate state resources to reward the political loyalty of kin groups. In this way, corruption came to represent the perpetuation of certain types of exclusion and governance in society. Dommer observes that corrupt influences of this kind may include prebendalism where state institutions and structures are harnessed to generate the largest share of benefits to insiders, or in the extreme case, to kleptocracy (1997:486-491).
Szeftel (2000) observes that, where tribalism is exploited to enhance exclusiveness, the potential for corruption tendencies to precipitate destructive consequences becomes very real, as rival factions behave in kind (2000:429-430). Szeftel invokes the Prisoner’s Dilemma model to fathom the potential implications of tribally driven corrupt practices:
The factions are engaged in a distinctive game of Prisoner’s Dilemma. If they can co-operate in order to modify corruption and appropriation, there might be some reward for all groups and the looting of the state might be moderated. But the logic of ethnic competition drives them on and seemingly justifies their behaviour in the eyes of their supporters. If they don’t maximise rewards, another faction will. Thus, all continue looting even to the point of institutional disintegration and development disaster (2000:437-8).
Contemporary forms of corruption: Budgetary capture
Budget allocations to various ministries represent large flows of resources, and are often subject to different types of misappropriation: procurement of supplies, often carried out by powerful officials, through means which bypass formal channels of tendering known to economize on the use of scarce public resources; the re-ordering of policy priorities on the part of those with political influence in order to fulfil their own requirements; and the arbitrary and discretionary nature of development project selection. This latter often leads to the purchase of projects with little, or no, developmental value, which, even when properly delineated, can still involve inflationary costs through over-invoicing and other manipulations. This reduces public resources that could otherwise have been spent improving the quality of public services. These types of embezzlement are also common in municipal, provincial and local authorities. For example, in Kenya, the Anglo-Leasing scandal (see below) illustrates non-transparency in project procurement, and the initial unwillingness of the government to reveal the identity of financial recipients suggests a promise of immunity to future potential parties to embezzlement.
Even when corruption is perceived in economic terms, the influence of politics looms large at the level of state actors. It is at this level that political involvement lends itself to criminalisation. Bayart et al. identifies several attributes of this phenomenon: the use of the organs of state for private purposes; the illegitimate use of the instruments of coercion for private ends; the existence of an informal power structure – a shadow clique surrounding the official occupant of a senior political office and influencing and controlling his actions; and the participation of this shadowy clique in corrupt economic activities, illegal under national laws and criminal in international law (1999:25-26).
Meanwhile, from the contents of various Auditor General reports, in particular, and their scathing observations about grave irregularities concerning budgetary expenditures by governments, it is possible to discern general patterns of embezzlement by political elites which could generate insights or the pathology of rent-seeking maximisation that has so far governed opportunistic vampirism in some sub-Saharan countries.4
Let us suppose Robberyia is the name of a hypothetical African country whose budgetary resources are mismanaged by a corrupt political elite. Although Robberyia has the trappings of a quasi-democracy, in truth, its rulers use robbery with violence to ‘win’ heavily rigged elections once it has a head of state who routinely violates party and national constitutions. Every year, Robberyia’s Chancellor of the Exchequer reads the budget to the multi-tribal nation, an event that summarises how much money the economy plans to raise through taxes and other means, and how the revenues will be allocated for development and recurrent expenses (government expenditure). The expenditures are expected to cover the public sector wage bill, fuel, stationery, transport, water, telephone, rent, security, medicines, repairs, operation, and maintenance activities (i.e. a whole raft of day-to-day expenses). In addition, the budgetary resources are expected to finance infrastructural investments such as transport, education and health facilities. The interventions are meant to promote social justice through redistribution of income and wealth, and improve overall economic efficiency.
However, in embezzled or misappropriated economies such as Robberyia, leaders do everything in their power to keep the public sector wage component of recurrent expenditure at a minimum in order to capture as much as possible for companies fronted by the political elite. Thus this scenario would represent that part of recurrent government expenditure that takes care of electricity, telephone, water, fuel, stationary, medical drugs, security, cleaning and other services, and costs related to operation, maintenance and repair of government institutions and facilities. Their private firms would provide cleaning, security and other services for a rent-seeking fee; would ‘win’ tenders to supply stationery, fuel, defence uniforms, lubricants, etc. to public institutions; and to newly privatised energy, water, and telecommunications companies (where they have massive shareholding or controlling interests).
Thus, the Robberyia government would rebuff all efforts by the public sector workforce to secure wage increases and allied benefits due to parochially partisan vampiristic interests which would not wish to see the relatively large windfall rent compromised or sacrificed. Acquiescence to wage increases would run contrary to the dynamic logic of vampirism. If these increases in public sector wages are conceded, then the vampiristic leaders of Robberyia could perhaps still capture the large extractive rents if they agree to allocate a proportion of the budgeted development expenditure to meet the wage demands. But to do so would be tantamount to losing extractive rents from ‘real’ planned development investments (‘real’ being a notional, and often excessive value) expected to be drawn by the elites’ front companies. Again, the Robberyia leaders would not be willing to ‘make such financial sacrifices’ in this zero-sum game. They would rather line their pockets from budgetary resources earmarked for development investments in road, bridges, and other engineering projects.
Additionally, there are bogus expenditures – where a vampiristic leader, through trusted cronies – exerts pressure on the government Exchequer or his Treasury office to effect payments to front companies for work never done. Either way, the political elites of Robberyia would maximise the flow of extractive rents from public resources for projects never started or implemented even though they would formally have been budgeted for. Therefore, in a corrupt African state resembling Robberyia, political elites give undivided, opportunistic attention to maximising extractive rents from public resources, through exploitation, diversion and minimisation – also termed the pathology of debilitating budgetary capture. Within this logic can also be added the unbudgeted expenditures, which may or may not end with a physical and/or public good but are more often spent on personal consumption, where miscellaneous budget lines – although supposedly to cater for contingencies – have been grossly inflated and abused. Similarly, the presence of ghost workers in Africa's public sector, where vampiristic authorities conspire with heads of salary departments to share income streams of workers long dead, retired or fictitious, can also enhance a bogus expenditure.
The poor subjected to this logic suffer from progressive immiseration, whatever the economic public policy context. For example, privatisation designed to ostensibly increase the efficiency of parastatals become yet another opportunity for elites to capture shareholdings and rents, even in companies made dysfunctional in the state sector by previous misappropriation of public funds. At the same time, goods largely consumed by the poor like bread, kerosene, and second-hand clothes, are targeted for taxation, a move almost punitive in its poverty-increasing effect, as economic inefficiency reduces the revenue base. Only by punitive taxation can the finances be generated to satisfy the leaders’ pathological dynamic for budgetary capture, not least because the elites themselves evade taxation and custom duties in an institutionalised manner. Tax evasion is an addition to the public immiseration caused by embezzlement of pension funds and money belonging to public banks; the persistent over and under-invoicing in transactions across the range of public sector institutions; and the fire sale of all types of public assets to overseas investors for a personal rent. Infants, the aged, women and other vulnerable persons – who run into millions – have been swindled by leaders with a reputation for ‘preaching democratic water and drinking corruption wine’, despite a veneer of quasi democracy in Robberyia.
A political theory of economic embezzlement
What whets the appetite in unaccountable, corrupt regimes to amass incredible amounts of fortune? How can one account for the urge to accumulate vast quantities of capital and wealth? Liberia’s Samuel Doe is reported to have amassed wealth equivalent to half the country’s annual domestic product with close associates enjoying commercial opportunities and personal favours as a means of securing their loyalty (Reno, 2000:46). To amass such a level of fortune, a head of state does not rely on the glacially slow legal and conventional methods of income generation. Political experience called for haste in the aggrandisement process, i.e. speed was of the essence. The motives that induce this behaviour may vary according to circumstances, time and serendipity, and include the imperative of self-preservation. At the initial stages, the agenda may be driven by deep-seated egalitarian sentiments or the need to establish an equitable order across society. But this quest faces resistance from entrenched forces who begin to sense that their hitherto dominant political interests are being reined in, such that the agenda gets enmeshed with emerging exigencies, hitherto unforeseen, which compel the powerful elites to incorporate more self-serving measures, undoubtedly rationalised by reference to the common good but involving punitive measures nonetheless.
Almost invariably in Africa, parties that formed governments during the one-party era were also the ones that won the first multiparty elections in the 1990s. Although there have been exceptions to this general pattern such as in Zambia and Malawi, in the majority of cases several factors have worked in favour of incumbent regimes retaining power. Preeminent among them has been the inordinate financial muscle they enjoyed while, conversely, the opposition camp was critically indisposed financially. All over sub-Saharan Africa, opposition parties have made incessant demands on incumbent governments to inject, as a matter of policy, financial resources into their respective electoral machines.
However, it has been in the interest of parties in government to maintain financial poverty in the opposition camp, and even, according to the political theory of economic embezzlement, to increase it in order to undermine capacities for political mobilisation and electoral competition. For example, the parliamentary events in Zimbabwe in early April 2001 brought the issues of chronic financial incapacity of opposition parties into sharp relief. Mr. Mugabe’s government introduced two bills designed to criminalise receipt of any overseas funds or political support in kind (e.g. equipment) by opposition forces.
However, even succeeding political administrations in Zambia, Liberia, Malawi, Zaire, Ethiopia, Nigeria (under the military regimes), have misappropriated public wealth to alter the balance of political power, this also occurs in Mozambique, Angola and Sierra Leone. Such strategic manoeuvres by the erstwhile opposition have generally been pursued with speed because, in the game of adversarial power politics in poverty-stricken, quasi-democratic Africa, time is of the essence. For example, in Chiluba’s government, degeneration was rapid and finger-pointing common. Two years after the MMD took power, the leader of the Zambia Congress of Trade Unions, Mr. Jackson Shamanda, asked:
If the ministers say they are corrupt and involved in drugs, who are we to believe otherwise? (Africa Events, 1994:6).
But within a year and four months of assuming power, the NARC government became dogged by embarrassing disclosures that a number of highly placed government officials and ministers were party to grave corruption scandals involving hundreds of millions of dollars. The most infamous was the Anglo Leasing corruption scam, which involved two single-sourced turnkey contracts irregularly awarded to the Anglo Leasing and Finance Limited (ALFL), who were to source project finance, which the Kenyan government was eventually to service at commercially exorbitant rates. The first deal, amounting to €21 million, required ALFL to provide terrorism-proof passport-making equipment to protect against forgery and photo-substitutional frauds. The initial open competitive tendering process was overturned by the NARC government in 2003, when the Ministry of Finance negotiated a turnkey project with ALFL that cost more than three times the original option. The second scandal was also a single–sourced turnkey project, where ALFL was awarded a US$40 million contract, again through dubious means, to establish three forensic laboratories and headquarters for the Criminal Investigation Department (CID).
Those subsequently implicated in renttaking – two senior ministers and their respective permanent secretaries – are known to be trusted members of President Kibaki's inner circle. When no government action was forthcoming save officials' platitudes, the British envoy to Kenya, Sir Edward Clay, delivered a seismic salvo on the matter. In a remarkably revealing statement he made in July 2004, he asserted that the corrupt government officials were driven by ‘…greed and a desperate sense of panic that leads them to eat like gluttons’ (italics mine). In terms of the model here, Clay's reference to speed and time in his characterisation of the officials' venal gluttony is pertinent. The government was profoundly rattled by the envoy's diplomatic projectile; but instead of addressing the serious corruption allegations pointed out by the High Commissioner, the government initially became evasive and defensive. Eventually, however, former permanent secretaries Joseph Magari, Zakayo Cheruyiot, Sylvester Mwaliko and John Agili were charged with corruption in connection with the Anglo Leasing scandal on Wednesday, 16 February 2005. The Attorney General, Amos Wako summarised in Court that since 1993 he had received a total of 57 investigation files from the anti-corruption police unit, the anti corruption commission and the CID, but with prosecution having been concluded in only five cases and a remaining 23 cases in process or awaiting trial (Kenya Broadcasting Corporation, 2005).
Against this backdrop of Kenya's immediate post-Moi phase of high official corruption, the question that arises is why a government, whose coalition party campaigned vigorously, resolutely, and unambiguously on an anti-corruption platform has several of its high-ranking ministers and officials (many of whom are known to be very close to the Head of State) deeply implicated in venal practices? Conservative estimates pitch the theft at approximately US$87,500,000. It should be borne in mind that NARC's limited financial resources prior to the 2002 general election were no match to KANU's formidable resources – except Kibaki's Democratic Party (DP) faction of the NARC coalition which was of modest means; the rest were largely indisposed on this front.
Given the political stakes involved in the next general election in 2007, some in the Democratic Party of NARC, who lead key ministries by virtue of Kibaki's Presidency, are perhaps strategising in financial terms well ahead of the forthcoming electoral contest. They certainly have access to rent-seeking opportunities, and this paper contends that the motive is the principle of political self-preservation. It is thus not surprising that those mentioned adversely in Kenya’s multimillion dollar corruption scandals belong mainly to the DP wing of the coalition.
Indeed, successive rulers in sub-Saharan African countries have felt insecure at the prospect of electoral competition in the context of this model of corruption, where political supporters must be bought and political opponents impoverished. For example, an incumbent from a minority tribal group may be viewed by other stakeholders as doing little for them, thus encouraging oppositional groups to form. In extreme cases of tribal discrimination ‘sense of grievance and rebellion’ emerges in the exploited group and civil unrest can result (Keen, 2000:31). However, if the head of state secures decisive support from the leaders of the national army he appointed, and also enjoys loyalty from the police, parliament, and other state organs with potentially coercive powers, then his political continuity is almost assured.
This may be the case especially if he has already demonstrated his resolve to employ Machiavellian tactics of oppression, intimidation, brutal suppression and blackmail against dissidents. However, after a while, the leader begins to recognise that, in a society typified by widespread poverty and where mere existence is a struggle, the stick employed to keep people in line can be brandished with greater effectiveness if complemented by the carrot: a head of state can win considerable political mileage by entrenching the patronage system even further. He can signal publicly, but with some diplomatic aplomb, to individuals or groups that they will stand to gain if they behave themselves. Thus, he can buy their silence or secure their grudging cooperation by distributing favours through political appointments, land allocations, cash payments or easy credit access. Even favours to loyal and close supporters can be seen as a political insurance policy: a hedging exercise designed to bolster the defences against a potential re-assertion of conflicting tribal loyalties or counter initiatives by established enemies. Reno makes the following point with respect to rulers and patronage-based embezzlement in shadow states – defined as regimes underpinned by personalisation of authority and the private use of national assets (2000):
To make patronage work as a means of political control, the rulers must prevent all individuals from gaining unregulated access to markets … (he) will minimize the provision of public goods to a population … Removing public goods … is done to encourage individuals to seek the ruler’s favour … (2000:46-47).
The instinct for political self-preservation against real and imagined adversaries, including the active encouragement accorded to loyal allies from other tribal communities to participate in this preservation, is one of the most powerful reasons for massive financial aggrandisement. In other words, astute heads of state, as consummate political operators, are not born thieves; on the contrary, their kleptomaniac tendencies stem from, or are triggered by, the forces of political circumstance. But the strategy of taking on real and imagined political enemies in an adversarial but misgoverned regime does not only involve the rapid accumulation of immense wealth and vast financial resources (to equal or surpass the enemies pecuniary capacity), but also combines lethal initiatives to cripple the economic might of the opposition forces, which in turn makes the sources of financial generation belonging to the opposition, including businesses, the subject of orchestrated impoverishment.
So, when leaders dip their fingers in public tills, it should not be concluded too readily that it is rapacious greed, for its own sake, that prompts them; rather, this thievish behaviour could well be rooted in imperatives of political expedience, for better or for worse; this is much akin to the principle of necessitarianism. If incumbent leaders harbour the view that a previous administration was biased in, and tribally-inclined to, favouring certain tribal communities in the allocation of political and economic resources, then initiatives at broad equalisation (for purposes of restorative tribal equity) are regarded by supporters as a case of necessitarianism: it is a question of righting past wrongs. In this way, the ghosts of past iniquities seem to haunt an affected state and encourage new aberrations.
Of course, some leaders have diverted public resources for personal enrichment in a bid to satisfy their egos. Vanity, including the quest for symbolic immortality through self-royalisation, is also part of the motivations for large-scale robbery and personal misuse of public resources. Bedel Bokassa of the Central African Republic fits well into this model. Others aggrandise for reasons of political imagery and the God-like effect they potentially generate. Mobutu descending from heaven as witnessed in Zairian television screens was a case in point. Felix Houphet Boigny’s (Côte d’Ivoire) tendencies combined the aspect of political preservation with the dimension of spiritual exhibition (constructing baroque churches), the latter component tending to show that there is enough even for gratuitous, religious pursuits. But only incredibly rich leaders can do this – to remind their political enemies of their omnipotence, almost divine in its heavenly construction, and their staggering wealth, ready to be employed to ensure political self-preservation. Yet still others amass fantastic fortunes, not to lead opulent lives or engage in affluent exhibition, but out of perceived political necessity and self-preservation in the face of enemies who may behave similarly. However, this logic is contradictory, because in the act of accumulating personal fortune the polity is being undermined by corruption and theft, which in itself creates the conditions for new opposition to emerge.
Conclusion
The motives for the gargantuan scales of embezzlement witnessed across the length and breath of Africa do not seem to revolve directly around the leaders’ partiality for extravagant lifestyles of obscene ostentation, although these are nonetheless enjoyed by them. Rather, the reasons seem to be invariably political, in particular, the deep-seated desire of those in power for self-preservation and perpetuity. Leaders in Africa have nurtured the impression that personal survival and political continuity is a function of huge financial abilities, large enough to neutralise threats from detractors or adversaries. Rapid aggrandisement, through means fair and foul, is calculated to serve that purpose. To this end, therefore, leaders of shadow states work unremittingly to ensure comprehensive monopolisation of money-spinning public contracts. In addition, they often have elaborate networks of covert operations designed to emasculate the sources of income generation or enrichment of their political enemies. This twin strategy of amassing incredible amounts of fortune, on the one hand, and the deliberate pauperisation of an incumbent’s political enemies, on the other, is what I have termed the political theory of economic embezzlement.