How African dictators corrupt European politics
 
Pambazuka News (2012-04-19, Issue 581)
 
<http://pambazuka.org/en/category/features/81461>http://pambazuka.org/en/category/features/81461
  
It is not only African presidents who are corrupted by European
aid-with-strings-attached. Evidence abounds showing a secret and extensive
“suitcase” system in which millions of dollars are sent by African
dictators to corrupt the European political process.
 
By Michael Schmidt
 
INTRODUCTION
 
We have seen several curious reversals of the usual pecking order in world
affairs regarding Africa’ status of late, not least of which have been the
spectacle of Portugal begging for aid from its former colony Angola, and
of European citizens relocating back to their former colonies, fleeing
economic crisis in Europe for poorly-paid jobs in the African hinterland.
[1]
 
But there is a longer-lived and more secret relationship between Africa
and Europe that overturns the conventional view of African presidents
being corrupted by European aid-with-strings-attached; this is the
phenomenon of la valise, “the suitcase” system of millions sent over
decades by African dictators to corrupt the European political process.
Seeing as how language differences divide common understanding between
Francophone Africa and Anglophone Africa, the two largest
colonial-language blocs, it is worth us here in the English-speaking part
of the continent to examine this phenomenon so entrenched in Francophone
African affairs – and now apparently spreading. The Center for French and
Francophone Studies at Duke University in North Carolina hosted a debate
on la valise on 5 October 2011 called “The Colonies Pay Back: Culture and
Corruption in Franco-African Relations,” and this article comprises
extracts from that debate.
 
POST-COLONIAL FRANCE, THE “SUITCASE REPUBLIC”
 
Philippe Bernard, the outgoing Le Monde correspondent for Africa,
initiated the debate by noting that Robert Bourgi, [2] Gaullist French
President Nicolas Sarkozy’s unofficial advisor, had in September 2011
accused former socialist President Jacques Chirac and his Prime Minister
Dominique de Villepin, who were in power from 1995-2007, of having
received enormous bribes in the form of suitcases stuffed with cash, from
five West and Central African states – the Congo, Burkina Faso, Senegal,
Ivory Coast, and Gabon – to fund Chirac’s campaign. In a later interview
with Canal+, Bourgi claimed that the 1988 campaign of far-right candidate
Jean-Marie le Pen of the National Front, had also been partly funded by
the valise. Chirac and de Villepin have denied Bourgi’s claims.
 
According to the Telegraph’s retelling of the tale, [3] Bourgi claimed in
an interview with Le Journal du Dimanche that he had personally
“transported ‘tens of millions of francs’ each year, with the amounts
going up in the run-up to French presidential elections – an intimation
the cash was used to fund Mr Chirac's political campaigns. ‘I saw Chirac
and Villepin count the money in front of me,’ he said. He alleged he
regularly passed on bank notes from five African presidents: Abdoulaye
Wade of Senegal [in power 2000-2012]; Blaise Campaoré of Burkina Faso
[1987-today]; Laurent Gbagbo of Ivory Coast [2000-2011]; Denis Sassou
Nguesso of the Congo [1997-today] and Omar Bongo of Gabon [1967-2009],
whom Mr Bourgi called ‘Papa’. Together, he alleged they contributed
£6.2-million to Mr Chirac's successful 2002 presidential campaign. A sixth
leader, President Obiang N’Guema of Equatorial Guinea [1979-today]
allegedly was the last member to join the cash donor club,” until, Bourgi
claimed, a nervous de Villepin brought the system to a halt in 2005.
Bourgi claimed he had personally run the valise system for 25 years and in
exchange, the African dictators were granted huge reductions in their debt
to France once their sponsored candidate attained office in the Elysée.
 
Bernard said he believed the system had arisen out of the notion of
“France-Afrique, the confusion of French and African interests. It has
been a public secret since [African] liberation in the 1960s: in 1960/61,
deals were signed that France will use its power to defend the [African]
regimes and France will have exclusive access to African raw materials and
the right of France to intervene militarily in case of threats to African
national security. In the 1980s, the Gaullists [then in opposition against
François Mitterand’s Socialist government] were similarly accused – that a
percentage of Gabonese oil revenues were allegedly used to finance their
campaigns – but proof and public testimony was lacking.”
 
Professor Stephen Smith, former Africa editor of Libération, and Bernard’s
predecessor at Le Monde, recalled rumours that “money smuggled in by
Africans to the French Prime Minister’s office in djembe drums. The office
has no air-conditioning, so the thought of him standing there with his
sleeves rolled up counting it all is amusing.” On a serious note, however,
Smith recalled that in 1971, at the very start of a reign that only ended
in 1993, it was said that the first President of Ivory Coast, Félix
Houphouët-Boigny, had donated “bags of money” to the conservative Georges
Pompidou government. There was, Smith said, “a long contuinuity of the
practice from the Gaullists [Charles de Gaulle was in power 1959-1969] to
[the rightist Republican Valéry] Giscard d’Estaing [1974-1981], a
continuity of conservative governments,” who had been propped up by la
valise: “This amounts to a post-colonial ‘informal state,’ not on paper,
but in practice.”
 
Remember that this period – the Fifth French Republic – was brought into
being in 1958 by the crisis in France precipitated by the Algerian
Liberation War. So we have half a century of African dictators, installed
and propped up by French military power, who in turn propped up with
African oil and other revenue, a string of conservative sister regimes in
France – although Smith said that the valise system in the six countries
also worked via French companies working in parallel in the former
colonies: one paid the French conservative Gaullists; the other paid the
French socialists and communists. Given France’s strategic position within
Europe, its influence only matched by Germany and Britain, anyone able to
buy the French Presidency in effect purchases huge influence in Europe
itself – so progressive politics on both continents appear to have been
bedeviled by these secret transactions.
 
Smith said that his first newspaper scoop on the secret practice regarding
the shadowy character of Bourgi, was in 1995 for Libération when he wrote
about the unprocedural write-off of Zaïrean dictator Mobutu Sese Seko’s
debts: Mobutu “raised his little staff and I was afraid he would hit me!
Robert Bourgi earned €600,000 from Mobuto to put out the fire – and he
earned €1-million to stop a book that I was writing.”
 
Bourgi’s “accounting is pristine; he deals only in cash, so there is
little to prove.” The bribe money was later deposited in South African or
Lebanese bank accounts, Smith claimed. The reach of Bourgi’s unofficial
power was considerable: Smith claimed that when Sarkozy wanted a rare
photo-opportunity with South Africa’s now-reclusive and elderly Nelson
Mandela, Bourgi simply phoned up “Papa,” Gabonese President Omar Bongo,
who persuaded the old man to agree to fly to Paris for the meeting in
2007.
 
THE SUITCASE SYSTEM EXPANDS
 
Prof Achille Membe, a specialist in post-colonial Africa, responded that
the valise system was one of “mutual corruption” that has “shackled France
and Africa for decades”: “The relationship is not only corrupt in terms of
money… It’s a deeper form of cultural corruption that has emasculated
somewhat African civil societies. In terms of the future, France still has
military bases in Africa and can kick out a Gbagbo. But when France has to
pay a heavy price [for intervention], it will think twice.”
 
Bernard said that as France’s grip on the African continent started to be
eclipsed militarily (by the USA in particular [4]), in terms of the
Francophone African CFA currency which is linked to the embattled Euro, in
terms of French companies losing their exclusive relationships with
African regimes as the International Monetary Fund took the reins in many
countries and as Chinese, Brazilian and Indian investment poured into the
continent, Sarkozy wanted the “network of go-betweens” such as Bourgi, who
had “operated as a parallel diplomat,” to end.
 
Smith agreed that France now made more money from its relations with
Anglophone Africa – South Africa and Kenya in particular – than it did
from its former colonies, but warned that “now you’ve got a multiplication
of the French exceptionalist models: China’s Africa relationship is as
corrupt as the French; the French preserve and privilege has now become
globalised.” Membe added that in his view, the waning of the French star
in Africa – despite French remaining a dominant African language, and
despite the existence of an African Diaspora literati in France – was that
France itself “has entered a process of re-provincialising,” of
monocultural conservatism and retreat from world affairs.
 
Membe said that “Robert Bourgi’s ‘revelations’ weren’t revelations in
Africa. In Francophone Africa, this hasn’t been perceived as a scandal”
because the prevailing cynicism about Franco-African relations was
underscored by a long-term trend of the decline of the importance of
France to its former colonies: “Geography is no longer centred on Paris…
Robert Bourgi and others are the last spasms of a dead proposition,
something that is on its knees, no longer historical but anecdotal… France
will become a parenthesis.”
 
But it is very far from clear whether the valise system has indeed come to
an end and lost its ability to shape African history. Smith said that
Sarkozy’s own reputation was in doubt as he had written off 40% of the
debts of Congo and of Gabon – whereas Chirac had capped the write-offs at
only 8%, so suspected payments to Sarkozy would have been “a good
investment by African leaders.” If Sarkozy is also involved, then Bourgi’s
end-game in speaking out about the valise system after 25 years – and
claiming it ended with Chirac – is clearly not aimed at tarnishing Chirac,
who is a dying man and a spent political force, but rather to threaten
Sarkozy while he is still President, forcing him to allow Bourgi to retire
smoothly, without fear of prosecution, aged 67, to his newly-purchased
mansion in Corsica.
 
Smith said the roots of the system lay in the fact that “when Europeans
came to Africa, they ‘unbuttoned’ themselves,” initiating the corrupt
relationship. But it takes two to tango, so what of the agency of African
leaders themselves? “If I was an African leader today,” Smith admitted,
“I’d still ‘invest’ in France because the United Nations, IMF etc will
turn to France when they need assistance in Africa – despite it having
lost leverage as a one-stop centre – so African leaders’ choices will
still count.”
 
It is clear the suitcase system will continue, although likely spreading
to include several newly invested powers – the USA, China, Brazil, India
and South Africa – and ironically, with continental growth at 5.5%,
peripheral Africa’s ability to influence and corrupt political affairs in
the metropole may well even increase.
 
END NOTES
 
[1] An example these tales of return is at
<http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/14/business/global/14angolabiz.html>www.nytimes.com/2010/07/14/business/global/14angolabiz.html
 
[2] Born in Dakar, Senegal, in 1945 to a French Lebanese family, Bourgi
was admitted at the Paris Bar as a lawyer. A former adviser to Chirac and
de Villepin, Sarkozy awarded him the Legion d’honneur in 2007.
 
[3]
<http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/france/8756097>www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/france/8756097
 
[4] In the 1960s, there were 20,000 French soldiers stationed in Africa,
now there are less than 5,000 – although their technical capacity today is
far greater. However, in Mali, which has just experienced a coup d’etat,
there is a significant American military presence, whereas the French have
indicated they will not intervene as was their practice in the past;
Sarkozy had reopened the mothballed French military base in Ivory Coast,
but France’s 2011 intervention in Ivory Coast only occurred under United
Nations mandate.
                                          

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