By CHARLES IWUOHA

The Leadership, Entrepreneurship and Advocacy Network (LEAD Network), a non-profit organisation, has blamed western countries for the unabated and continuous Looting of African countries by corrupt leadership.

The Executive Director of the group, Mr. Chukwuma Okenwa, said this on Wednesday in Enugu while speaking with newsmen while speaking on the sidelines of the shortfalls and foreign exchange disparities in the amount of money repatriated as Abacha’s loot to Nigeria from Jersey, US recently.

He noted that naturally, God blessed the African continent with overwhelming and abundant money-spinning natural resources but some western countries and state-actors had connived with few crooks in leadership to deny Africa and her people the prosperity that it should have.

According to him, Africa is never a poor continent, but challenged with poor leadership that have no business and thought concerning communal and collective posterity of all her people.

“If we go into the politics of Abacha’s loot, how much exactly did Abacha deposit in dollars? And are we getting repaid in the naira equivalent of the money today with respect to the units of dollars Abacha made away with over 25 years ago?

“If when Abacha stashed those funds, it was at N21.89 to $1 then; and at the moment, the value of $1 is N360 official rate and about N390.68 unofficial rate. Then repatriating the cash in terms of the naira units as at the present time of transaction will be fraudulent; since it did not follow the exact foreign exchange rate when the looted money was stashed about 25 years ago. What about the interest expected to have accrued on the amount being repatriated,” he queried.

The LEAD Network boss said that Nigerians must also not fail to appreciate that such illicit transaction gave undue advantage to the dollars over the naira for many decades now.

“Now it has touched the ‘righteous nation’ to return the money to their corrupt Nigeria, will they equally return the lost value of our currency,” he said.

Okenwa said that he was definitely certain that the Western nations do know the total of all our monies stolen from Nigeria and other African countries in their custody ab initio.

“They can only release it in batches because of the serious impact it could have on their economy. The same criminals who stole and yet steal from Africa today have the effrontery to call us poor.

Okenwa noted that in crime parlance, if there is no receiver of stolen materials/money; the criminals or intending criminal would be total discouraged to steal in the first place.