Former South African President, Thabo Mbeki, has advised the in-coming Buhari administration to pay attention to the coordination, capacity boosting and proper functioning of the anti-corruption institutions already on ground in the country, in order to achieve tangible progress in his proposed fight against corruption.
Mr Mbeki was speaking to the media after presenting the African Union high-level report on the illicit financial flows from Africa, which was unanimously adopted by the on-going Pan African Parliament in South Africa.
The 122-page report tagged ‘Track It, Stop It, Take it’ gave details of the findings of how Africa loses billions of dollars annually through practices like money laundering, trade mis-invoicing, shell banks, transfer invoicing and unchecked tax incentives amongst others.
Mr Mbeki, who first started investigating illicit financial flows for the AU in 2012, said they’ve uncovered wide-ranging abuses of financial laws.
“The figure of 50 billion is an underestimate, as it excludes such elements as trading services and intangibles, process of bribery, and trafficking drugs, people and firearms”.
He further noted that the failure of African states to prevent the outflow of capital and tax evasion has had a serious impact on Africa’s growth.
“You know that many of our African countries did not achieve all these MDGs because of insufficient capital to finance the required actions”, he said.
