The Minister of Justice has said that Africa will continue to grapple with challenges related to corruption and asset recovery if there is no improvement in how information is coordinated and exchanged and how suspicious transaction reports by investigators and customs agencies are handled. The Minister said this Wednesday while officially opening the 3rd Edition of the African Anti-Corruption Dialogue that is underway in Kigali. Held under the theme: “Towards a Common African Position on Asset Recovery”, the dialogue brought together representatives of AU partner states, international organisations, national anti-corruption agencies, civil society, academia and other actors. He pointed out that lack of investigative skills, secrecy surrounding the illicit activities and inadequate resources allocation to financial aspects of the crime continue to slow down efforts to beat corruption on the continent. He pointed out that despite the presence of numerous asset recovery frameworks, progress on asset recovery especially within Africa has remained wanting. “A number of African countries continue to face numerous internal and external obstacles in recovering stolen assets. Internal challenges have been cited as the absence of comprehensive policies, lack of technical capacity and ineffective inter-agency cooperation,” he said. According to the African Development Bank, as of 2015, Africa was losing $148bn to corruption every year. Call for action Busingye also pointed out that the AU Member States had adopted the Nouakchott Declaration on the African Anti-Corruption Year in which they committed to progressively abolish bank secrecy jurisdictions and tax havens on the continent, establish public beneficial ownership registers and ensure that public officials declare their assets. It was agreed that the development of a Common African Position on Asset Recovery had been identified as being an important tool to assist member states in advancing anti-corruption reforms. “However, one year later, 55 out of 49 member states have signed and only 41 have ratified the African Union Convention on Preventing and Combating Corruption. Let me call all of you here to speed up the signing and ratification,” he said. The Chairperson of the African Union Advisory Board on Corruption; Begoto Miarom said that after a group of a high level experts on illicit financial flows had estimated money from the African continent at over $50bn, exercises to follow up on these assets has been frustrated by unenthusiastic cooperation from member countries. He pointed out that earlier this year, questionnaires relating to the stolen assets recovery were given to all AU member states to learn about the existence of judicial, political, legal institutional framework or guidelines governing stolen assets recovery in the respective states and all other initiatives in place in line with the subject matter. “Up to now, of 55 AU member states, we have received responses from only 25 percent of them,” he said. In their “Stolen Asset Recovery” initiative in 2007, the World Bank Group and the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) estimated that between $20bn and $40bn was diverted by corrupt public service agents in developing countries.
