Accra — Even Nigeria's Senate is riddled with scams and inflated contracts, with proceeds pocketed by sitting senators.

According to the president of the Institute of Chartered Accountants of Nigeria, ICAN, Chief Jaiye K. Randle, that individual Nigerians are currently lodging far more in foreign banks, which he estimated at $170 billion, than Nigeria's foreign debt of $35 billion.

Even when the loot is recovered, it is quickly re-looted! In Nigeria, about $709 million and another _144 million were recovered from the loot former president, General Sani Abacha, and his henchmen stashed abroad. But the Senate Public Accounts Committee found only $6.8 million and _2.8 million of the recovered booty in the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) (The Post Express (July 10, 2000).

In Kenya, constitutional reform has stalled under the watchful eyes of the "Mount Kenya mafia," as the ruling elite are called. Widespread government corruption has caused international donors to withhold money allocated to fight AIDS. The disease has killed about 1.5 million in Kenya since 1984. The government estimates that about 1.4 million Kenyans are still infected. Kenya's Health Ministry is riddled with graft. A recent audit revealed the existence of "ghost workers" with their annual $6.5 million salaries collected by living workers. In June 20, 2004, the same Health Ministry paid KSh140 million ($1.8 million) for a radiography machine for Kenyatta National Hospital that was never delivered.

In the past year, Kenya has been rocked by corruption scandals in various ministries but in case after case, no action was taken and ministers involved were merely sacked, not prosecuted to recover the loot. Africa's begging bowl

Africa's begging bowl leaks horribly. In August 2004, an African Union report claimed that Africa loses an estimated $148 billion annually to corrupt practices, a figure which represents 25 percent of the continent's Gross Domestic Product (GDP). Two years earlier at an African civic groups meeting in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, Nigeria's President, Olusegun Obasanjo, claimed that "corrupt African leaders have stolen at least $140 billion (£95 billion) from their people in the decades since independence" (The London Independent, June 14, 2002. Web posted at www.independent.co.uk). But these are gross underestimates. According to one UN estimate, $200 billion or 90 percent of the sub-Saharan part of the continent's gross domestic product was shipped to foreign banks in 1991 alone.

Civil wars continue to wreak devastation on African economies, costing at least $15 billion annually in lost output, wreckage of infrastructure, and refugee crises. The civil wars are over power, not redrawing artificial colonial borders, and are caused by the adamant refusal of African leaders to relinquish or share political power. The crisis in Zimbabwe, for example, has exacted an enormous toll on Africa. Foreign investors have fled the region and more than 4 million Zimbabweans have left the country along with 60,000 physicians and other professionals. The Observer [London] (Sept 30, 2001) estimated that Zimbabwe's economic collapse had caused $37 billion worth of damage to South Africa and other neighboring countries.

Civil wars

Africa can't feed itself because senseless civil wars, preference for industry, misguided statist policies of price controls and marketing boards have devastated its agriculture. By 2000, Africa's food imports had reached $18.7 billion, slightly more than donor assistance of $18.6 billion to Africa.

Clearly, the resources Africa needs to develop can be found in Africa itself - only if its leaders were willing to reform their abominable economic and political systems, re-orient their development policies toward agriculture, curb corruption and invest their wealth -B legitimate or ill-gotten C in Africa. But the leadership, wedded to the old "blame colonialism" paradigm, is not interested. It is programmed to look outside Africa and badger the West for resources. And to compound the problem, the West obliges them.

Burdened with excessive racial sensitivity and guilt over the iniquities of the slave trade and colonialism, the West has been reluctant to speak candidly about Africa. Unable to distinguish between African leaders and the African people, Westerners shy away from criticizing African leaders for fear of being labeled "racist" or accused of "blaming the victim." This overt racial sensitivity shields African leaders from criticism and inadvertently helps perpetuate misguided policies and wrong choices.

Worse, Western policies toward Africa has been leader-centered. Naïve Westerners think that the best way of helping the African people is by handing money over to their corrupt despots or forming "partnerships" with them. Italy, for example, pumped so much aid into Somalia that it became known as the "Graveyard of Aid." Between 1981 and 1990, Italy sponsored 114 projects in Somalia, costing more than $1 billion. According to Wolfgang Achtner, an Italian journalist, "with few exceptions (such as vaccination programs carried out by NGOs [nongovernmental organizations]), the Italian ventures were absurd and wasteful" (The Washington Post, 24 January 1993, C3). One example was for the $250 million spent on the Garoe-Bosaso road that stretched 450 kilometers across barren desert but crossed only by nomads on foot.

Effects

Piero Ugolini, a Florentine agronomist who worked for the technical unit of the Italian Embassy in Mogadishu from 1986 to 1990, revealed that most of Italian cooperation projects were carried out without considering their effects on the local population. "Italian aid program was used to exploit the pastoral populations and to support a regime that did nothing to promote internal development and was responsible for the death of many of its people," he said (cited in The Washington Post, 24 January 1993, C3). In 1993, Somali imploded.

There are better ways of helping Africa - by empowering its people. The leader-centered approach needs to be demolished and replaced with an institution-based approach. The following six institutions are critical:

•  An independent central bank: to assure monetary and economic stability, as well as stanch capital flight out of Africa. The World Bank, for example, should desist from dealing with African countries without an independent central bank. Central banks have been the linchpin in the transmission of loot by the ruling bandits.

•  An independent judiciary - essential for the rule of law. Supreme Court judges may also be rotated within a region. In December 2001, Mokhtar Yahyaoui, president of the Centre de Tunis pour l'independence de la Justice (CIJ), was dismissed as a judge in Tunisia after calling for the constitutional principle of the independence of the judiciary to be respected (Index on Censorship, July 2003; p.161). Independent media

•  A free and independent media to ensure free flow of information. The first step is solving a social problem is to expose it, which is the business of news practitioners. State-controlled or state-owned media do not expose corruption, repression, human rights violations and other crimes against humanity. In fact, it is far easier to plunder and repress people when they are kept in the dark. The media needs to be taken out of the hands of government and ought to be the first strategic enterprise the state should divest itself from before any foreign aid is given.

•  An independent Electoral Commission to avoid situations where African despots write electoral rules, appoint a fawning coterie of sycophants as electoral commissioners, throw opposition leaders in jail and hold "coconut" (farcical) elections to return themselves to power.

•  An efficient and professional civil service, which will deliver essential social services to the people on the basis of need and not on the basis of ethnicity or political affiliation.

•  The establishment of a neutral and professional armed and security forces.

Give the African people these six institutions and they themselves would solve more than 80 percent of Africa's problems by instigating change from within. These institutions cannot be established by the leaders or the ruling elites as there is a conflict of interest involved. They must be established by civil society.

For example, last December, while Ukrainians had camped outside parliament and government buildings to protest a fraudulent election, Ghanaians went to vote in one of the most peaceful and calm in Ghana's - indeed Africa's - recent history. The international news media missed it probably because there were no street protests or violence. Why the difference?

In Ukraine, the electoral commission and the media were state-controlled, except for a few private internet bloggers. The result was a stolen election that drove irate citizens into the streets to mount an Orange Revolution. Fortunately for the protesters, the security forces acted professionally and withheld fire. A fairly independent Supreme Court invalidated the fraudulent results, setting the state for their eventual overturn.

contrast

In Ghana, by contrast, the electoral commission was independent and the private media fiercely and raucously free -- especially the private FM radio stations and independent newspapers.

They played such a stupendous role during Ghana's 2000 elections, sending swarms of reporters to keep vigilance at polling stations. Any electoral irregularity was instantly reported on the air, causing teams of election officers to rush to the scene and fix the problem. Prior to the elections, the FM stations had, through their call-in shows, empowered the people with unfiltered information, urging them to exercise their right to vote. After observing Ghana's 2000 elections, New York Times columnist, Thomas Friedman, remarked: "Let's make all aid, all I.M.F.-World Bank loans, and all debt relief conditional on African governments' permitting free FM radio stations. Africans will do the rest." (NYT, May 4, 2001; p.A21).They haven't in many other African countries because their leaders control the key institutions and have formed "partnerships of death" with Western donors.

Said Mercy Muigai, an unemployed Kenyan woman, when African leaders trekked to Kananaski, Alberta (Canada) on June 26, 2002, to present NEPAD to the G-8 Summit for funding:

"All these people [African leaders and elites] do is talk, talk, talk. Then if they do get any money from the wazungu [white men], they just steal it for themselves. And what about us? We have no food. We have no schools. We have no future. We are just left to die@ (The Washington Times, June 28, 2002; p.A17).

The writer, a native of Ghana, is a Distinguished Economist at American University and President of the Free Africa Foundation. His new book is Africa Unchained .