How Kenya lost billions since independence

Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani is one of the new exciting Nigerian women writers, who include the much feted Chimananda Ngozi Adichie and my favourite Lola Shoneyin.

Nwaubani’s debut novel, I Do Not Come to You by Chance, paints a hilarious if tragic portrait of advance fee scammers, the chaps who send out those emails about stranded loot of deceased African dictators and corrupt officials waiting to be reclaimed with your kind assistance.

Anyone who has received such an email has probably wondered whether people actually fall for these scams. Apparently they do. The scammers in Nwaubani’s novel go by names like Cash Daddy, World Bank and Pound Sterling. Their lives revolve around debauchery, expensive cars and regaling about the stupid foreigners who fall for their scams. They call them mugus, which loosely translates to ‘big idiots’.

The advanced fee scammers seem to live by two simple rules. The first is that in a world teeming with greedy people, there are bound to be some wealthy ones foolish enough to fall for their scams. “There are mugus in America, Germany, Russia, Argentina, France….There are mugus all over the world.”

The second is that all Nigerian public officials are corruptible. Here is the main character in the novel narrating his uncle Cash Daddy’s phone conversation, about a public official who won’t sign a document. “And so what if it’s not their policy?” he yelled. “What car does he drive?” Cash Daddy asked… “Burn down that old car and resurrect another one for him within three days. Then take that document back to him to sign.”

At their core, Anglo Leasing type contracts are advance fee frauds. This is how it works. Scammers offer to supply as well as finance a government project. They set up two companies, the supplier and the financier. The government signs contracts with both.

The government provides payment in advance in the form of “IOUs” for the finance contracts. IOUs are like postdated cheques. The scammers in the meantime discount the IOUs with third parties for cash to finance the contract. Immediately, the government starts paying interest on the “finance.” This is only part of the scam—in fact the “good” part. The contract will have been inflated in the first instance. The goods supplied, if at all, will most likely be junk.

Anglo-Leasing type scams have been going on for a long time. The earliest ones on record date to the early 1970s. They are known as the Halal Meat Company and the Ken Ren Fertilizer Company.

Former Butere MP Martin Shikuku once said that the rain began to hit us one day in 1963 when one Bruce Mackenzie was introduced to Jomo Kenyatta. Said to have been a British spy, Mackenzie was Kenyatta’s Minister for Agriculture from independence until 1970. He died in a mysterious plane crash over the Ngong Hills in 1978, not unlike the one that killed George Saitoti.

At the height of the Anglo-Leasing scandal in 2004, I asked John Githongo, “Who is Anglo Leasing?”

“David” (pause), “Anglo Leasing is us.” “Who is us?” He slows down the treadmill (we were in a gym). “You know that cartoon character sleuth who follows a thief’s tracks all the way back to the house where he started?” “Yes, Donald Duck.” “Yap. You looking at him.”

The Ken-Ren Fertilizer plant was never build. Some junk machinery shipped into the country lay in the Mombasa port for decades—it may still be there. After more than thirty years, two Ken-Ren related loans suddenly appeared in our books.

The records show that the Ken Ren Fertilizer Company Restructuring Agreement of 16.6 million Euros (Sh1.4 billion), was contracted on November 14, 2000, but is repayable in semi-annual instalments from September 30, 2003 to March 31, 2014.

The Ken Ren Rescheduled Debt Agreement of 32.5 million Euros (Sh2.9 billion) is shown as having been contracted on November 6, 2002, and is repayable semi-annually from December 31, 2013 to June 30, 2015.

November 2000 happens to be the date that the government lost a Ken Ren case to an Anglo Leasing type company. It is rather peculiar that shylocks would be so kind as to give us a three-year grace period for a judgement debt.

It is far more likely that the “loans” were inserted in our books in 2003. The Kibaki regime, it seems, hit the ground running. But we are not supposed to be able to figure that one out. We are mugus.

The mandarins have been bawling at the top of their voices that we are staring economic Armageddon in the face if we don’t pay the scammers. If we do not float a sovereign Eurobond, the government was going to have to borrow domestically to plug the budget financing gap and the interest rates would go through the roof.

They were told that the scammers would be back for more. They would not listen. Having jalopies regularly resurrected, college fees taken care of, even the occasional escapade to the pleasure houses of the Orient, has a way of making one hard of hearing.

Once a country floats its currency and fully liberalises its capital account as we did two decades ago (that is allow free movement of money in and out of the country), the distinction between foreign and domestic borrowing becomes academic. Many of the bond funds we are told must be reassured by succumbing to blackmail are already heavily invest in shilling denominated bonds listed on the Nairobi Securities Exchange.

The key consideration they make is whether the interest differential between the shilling interest they earn and the dollar interest rates is sufficient compensation for the risk of the shilling weakening against the dollar.

There is nothing preventing the government from floating a dollar denominated bond in Kenya and listing it on the Nairobi Securities Exchange. It stands to reason that investors who buy shilling bonds listed in Kenya will just as happily buy dollar denominated bonds listed in Nairobi.

You would think that for all our anti-Western bravura and the Vision 2030 rhetoric about making Nairobi a financial hub, we would seize this opportunity to establish our own Afrodollar bond market. After all, our new Eastern bosom buddies are the biggest buyers of sovereign debt, surely they would snap it up.

No, we would rather pay bandits so that we float a Eurobond on the Irish Stock Exchange. Huo unaitwa ukoloni.

When they entered public life, Kenyatta, Moi and Kibaki were practically penniless. If you take their lifetime earnings from government, net of living expenses and expensive private school and university fees, it is doubtful that any of them would have been able to afford a house in Muthaiga.

You have to be an exceptional human being to spend your entire life in public office and build up a bigger fortune than the most enterprising hardworking fulltime business people. WE ARE MUGUS!
It has struck this particular mugu as noteworthy that the Kibaki regime started off reviving scams from the Kenyatta era, and Jubilee (aka Kanu reloaded) has started off working the ones from the Moi era.

Uhuru is Kenyatta’s biological son. He is Moi’s political son. It is said he is Kibaki’s godson. Apples don’t fall far trees.

Where to turn, but the Good Book.

“The Lord God compassionate and gracious, slow to anger, and bounding in loving kindness and truth;….Yet he will by no means leave the guilty unpunished, visiting the iniquity of fathers on the children and on the grand children to the third and fourth generation” (Exodus 34:6-7)

“When that time comes, people will no longer say, ‘the parent have eaten sour grapes, but the children’s teeth have grown numb’. Rather, each person will die for his own sins. The teeth of the person who eats the sour grapes will themselves grow numb. “Indeed a time is coming”, says the Lord, “when I will make a new covenant with the people….” (Jeremiah 31: 21-32)

Say Hallelujah!

Amen.

Dr Ndii is MD of Africa Economics.