Nigeria loses $83.3bn to illicit cash outflow

The African Development Bank on Tuesday said that Nigeria had recorded a cumulative illicit financial outflow of about $83.3bn in the past 51 years.
The Country Director, AfDB, Dr. Ousmane Dore, stated this in Abuja while delivering a paper entitled, “Domestic resource mobilisation for Nigeria’s development: Need for national compact against illicit financial flows.”
He spoke at a multi-stakeholders meeting on ‘Illicit financial flows out of Nigeria’ organised by a political think tank called Centre for Democracy and Development. According to him, the loss accounted for 5.6 per cent of total goods traded without proper invoicing in the last 51 years, between 1960 and 2011.
Dore added that the recent Global Financial Integrity report also ranked Nigeria seventh among the top 10 countries with highest illicit capital outflows in the developing world.
According to him, Nigeria has for many decades experienced a very serious problem with trade mis-invoicing, in the form of over-invoicing of imports and under-invoicing of exports for
the purpose of shifting money out of the
country.
He said, “Between 1960 and 2011, Nigeria
experienced cumulative illicit financial out flows totalling $83.3bn or 5.6 per cent of a total goods traded through mis-invoicing only.
Export under-invoicing takes the larger share of $44bn while the balance of $39.3bn was due to import over-invoicing.
Also speaking, the Director, CDD, Hajia Idayat Hassan, said the nation has sufficient resources to meet its developmental needs.
According to her, the illicit funds can be used to provide about 870, 000 schools and 400, 000 hospitals, among other things. She however, attributed the widespread illegal
financial outflows to governance challenges
including weak institutions, inadequate
regulatory environment, lack of transparency
and accountability.
Hassan said the situation had, for many years,
strained the capacity of governments in
various ways, thereby discouraging wealth
creation and development-oriented policies.