Given the heart-wrenching human rights records and cases of extra-judicial killings recorded under him, it’s debatable whether the late General Sani Abacha would end up in theists’ heaven. Many Nigerians who are victims of Abacha’s reign of terror would probably think of him now dwelling on the “other” side of heaven.
But in the last few years, no one has acted as Nigeria’s supportive “father in heaven” as much as Abacha has done, principally in terms of providing succour for a cash-strapped nation at its most critical point of need.
This week, the National Crime Agency (NCA) of the United Kingdom announced the recovery of yet another $23.5 million in looted funds from the allies and family the late Sani Abacha. The funds were retrieved as part of a wider pool of funds identified by the United States Department of Justice (USDOJ) as having been stolen out of Nigeria in the 1990s by Mr Abacha and his accomplices.
Before 1999, Nigeria had been ruled by 11 leaders: eight military heads of states and three civilians. Of the eight military heads of state, three are dead while five are still alive. Since 1999, the nation has also been governed by four civilian presidents, three of whom are still alive—and one is dead.
Yet among all of these leaders, Sani Abacha, the late head of state, has had the most notorious mention in the media in the last few years. Almost every year, investigators across different jurisdictions across the world often discover huge amounts of money linked to Abacha and allies.
“Relentless Giver”
Abacha ruled Nigeria between 1993 and 1998, when he died under mysterious circumstances. Since his death, every government that came after him has had to recover his loot from different jurisdictions. And word on the street is that he has been a “relentless giver.”
In an opinion piece published in a US publication in 2020, President Muhammadu Buhari made a tangential reference to recovery of the loot recorded under Abacha government, which he was a part of:
“And we can now move forward with road, rail and power station construction—in part, under own resources—thanks to close to a billion dollars of funds stolen from the people of Nigeria under a previous, undemocratic junta in the 1990s that have now been returned to our country from the U.S., U.K. and Switzerland.”
Meanwhile, a rough estimate of funds recovered from Abacha and allies since 1999, based on data crunched from newspaper reports, hovers around the region of $3.8 billion.
A TheCable report claimed that in 1998, Abubakar Abdulsalami, former military head of state, recovered $750 million from the Abacha family. In 2000, the report said, Obasanjo recovered $64 million from Switzerland; $1.2 billion in 2002; $88 million from Switzerland in 2003; and another $160 million from Jersey, British Island in 2003.
Between 2010 and 2022, the Jonathan and Buhari governments have equally recovered funds in the region of $1 billion.