Why can’t we plug the leaks that allow money to filter out?

A journalist friend of mine recently drew my attention to presentations made at a conference hosted by the Financial Transparency Coalition last week in Dar-es-Salaam, Tanzania.

Mr Zitto Kabwe, the chairman of Tanzania’s Parliamentary Public Accounts Committee, made a key presentation highlighting the role of parliaments in curbing illicit money transfers.

His presentation, as any good presentation is meant to do, initially started with startling numbers. Quoting an African Development Bank report, between 1980 and 2009 African economies lost between $597 billion and $1.4 trillion in resource transfers out of the continent.

He proceeded to highlight that $597 billion left Africa illicitly in the form of bribes, kickbacks, theft, tax evasion and avoidance while only $80 billion flowed into Africa in the form of foreign direct investment and aid.

The thrust of Mr Kabwe’s presentation was that multinationals are creating value in Africa but extracting that value through nefarious schemes such as transfer pricing and use of tax havens, particularly Mauritius, to move profits out of the source countries.

Mr Kabwe also drew attention to the fact that of the top 10 taxpayers in Tanzania, seven use tax havens, begging the question: what then could be the problem if they are still making it to the top 10 list of taxpayers?

He cited three largest mobile companies as all listed in tax havens and names Airtel as being registered in the tax haven of Holland (I wasn’t aware Holland was a tax haven), Tigo registered in the tax haven of Luxembourg and left a question mark next to the name of Vodacom, perhaps suggesting he couldn’t find where this multinational was incorporated.

It would have been great if the honourable MP had taken time to note that it is the parent companies that are registered overseas and that the local companies, which are subsidiaries, are very likely to be locally incorporated which is why they are paying taxes locally to the point where they feature as top tax payers.

But that is not the point of today’s piece. One cannot sensationalise the fact that multinationals are coming into your African country, making money, using all manner of tax avoidance schemes to get money out of the country and then state in the same breath that African countries have sent out billions in the form of kickbacks, bribes and theft from government coffers.

Multinational companies are organisations that have shareholders who have invested their capital with a view to getting a maximum return. They are not charitable organisations that are looking to give away money to whoever crosses their path.

They are responsible institutions that are keen to employ locals, improve the lives of the communities and (hopefully) preserve the environments in which they operate.

Knowing full well that a lot of government funds find their way into very deep unofficial pockets instead of development of infrastructure, health and education as they are supposed be, it is not in any company’s interest to throw money over an unaccountable cliff—especially where that money will simply be invested in personal assets of government officials in the very jurisdictions that these companies are registered anyway.

Come to think of it, perhaps these multinational culprits are doing our African economies a favour by taking the money to other jurisdictions that will use the money to improve the lot of their citizens by providing good infrastructure, health and education. At least someone gets to benefit.

Mr Kabwe’s sense of drama does not end with the numbers. His presentation makes a tongue- in-cheek allegation that even the government of Tanzania is guilty of tax avoidance and cites a government owned company “Tangold” as having been registered in the tax haven of Mauritius in 2006.

I did a quick google search of Tangold and only came up with a high quality pastry company in Australia with that name. I did a further google search of Tanzanian gold mining companies and came up with a whole list of companies, none of which claimed to have any ties to the government of Tanzania.

Soul brothers

This company, which the government registered in Mauritius, is so below the radar that even the Internet can’t find it.

I did come away with the knowledge that curious allegations of sinister public and private sector motives are not only aggressively made by Kenyan MPs. They have soul brothers across the border.

As long as our African governments continue to be massively inefficient in their management of public expenditure and increasingly corrupt in the use of tax payer revenue, well meaning companies will continue to find all manner of legal accounting loopholes to avoid financing personal accounts of corrupt officials.

Our African MPs and people representatives are better suited to asking themselves what is wrong with our governments.

Why can’t we plug the leaks that allow money to filter out of our economies into personal overseas accounts? Or is our collective native “Negro DNA” utterly and completely incapable of resisting the urge to dip our fingers into the cookie jar?

Perhaps anthropologists will find the solution to this quandary as it certainly has beaten everyone else.

In Kenya, we dare not even say that it has become institutionalised over the years since independence if the less than three-year-old Judiciary shenanigans are anything to go by.

This thing called corruption is characterised as a genome in our biological make up. We can’t get rid of it any easier than we can bleach our skins white. I say let the money stay offshore, at least we know $597 billion of it is put to some good use.

[email protected]; Twitter: @carolmusyoka