Illicit Financial Flows (IFFs)

Globalisation and digitalisation of the economy has radicalised tax administration and commerce in Africa. While there is still significant room for growth, there has been a paradigm shift in Africa’s development policy landscape over the past three decades. Economic liberalisation measures aimed at opening up the continent to global market forces and attracting foreign direct investment have significantly replaced state intervention and public ownership in most African countries.1 There is a race amongst governments in the continent to optimise and harness the vast tax potential of both the digital economy and the emerging digital finance market involving trading in cryptocurrencies, Non-Fungible Tokens (“NFTs”), and other digital assets. They aim to embrace the regulatory complexities of both the digital economy and the emerging digital finance market with a view to making their countries fit for the digital age and to building a future-ready economy that works for the advancement of their people. However, the rise of globalisation and digitalisation of the economy, including the economic liberalisation that followed, has (amongst other factors) allowed tax and commercially related Illicit Financial Flows (“IFFs”) to thrive in Africa. IFFs from Africa are said to have assumed crisis proportions in recent times.3 Global Financial Integrity (2010) reportedly estimates IFFs from Africa between 1970 and 2008 alone at more than U$1 trillion, an amount that dwarfs the combined inflows of developmental assistance and foreign direct investments into the continent over the same period.4 Nigeria is also reported to have led other resource-rich African economies with this enormous outflow, put at US$217.7 billion, or 30.5% of the total IFFs from Africa within the relevant period.5 Africa is currently estimated to be losing more than US$50 billion to US$86.63 billion annually in IFFs.6

South Africa was recently put on the Financial Action Task Force’s grey-list. The Financial Action Task Force (FATF) – an authoritative quasi-regulatory global body - relegates countries to ‘grey-list’ status when they fail to live up to global anti-money laundering, anti-terrorism, and anti-proliferation financing standards. Following an evaluation and extensive engagements with the African country, the FATF decided that a series of 8 strategic deficiencies needed to be addressed by South Africa before the end of 2025. It therefore placed South Africa under ‘increased monitoring’, a listing informally known as grey-listing. The FATF was created in 1989 to oversee the development and implementation of global anti-money laundering law. Through a series of developments – including the September 11, 2001 terrorism strikes in the United States – the FAFT’s mandate expanded to capture terrorist finance and proliferation financing. Drawn from the content of a series of international instruments attentive to the relationship between money and crime, the FATF compiled a set of 40 recommendations known as the global anti-money laundering, anti-terrorist finance, and anti-proliferation financing standards. The recommendations comprise matters such as specific money-laundering offences and confiscation regimes as well as measures designed to promote financial transparency (for instance, financial reporting requirements and beneficial ownership registries) and to facilitate international cooperation.

The International Asset Recovery Mechanism as it currently operates is highly unfair and disadvantageous to developing African countries. It is a system frost with power game, colonial vestige, and the undermining of the African sustainable development agenda. Indeed, African countries persistently suffer from the detrimental impact of outward illicit financial flows (IFFs), stemming from complex and multifaceted criminal and commercial activities. Latest IFFs estimates from the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development and African Development Bank (AfDB) reveal an ugly illicit financial flight that continues to deprive the continent of huge domestic resources and economic prosperity.

In recent times, developing countries are faced with a challenging task of balancing their commitment under various international instruments such as the Paris Agreement to achieve a Just Energy Transition and their pertinent need for industr1ialization and development. At the center of this contention is the knowledge that resources are scarce and must be allocated judiciously towards desired goals. The existing scarce resources are further plundered through illicit financial flows because of ineffective systems in developing countries. This paper examines the idea of a Just Transition through the lens of developing countries like African countries whose contribution to global greenhouse gas emissions have been minimal. The paper highlights access to finance as a key component of an expedient Just Transition and highlights illicit financial flow as a threat to the realization of the Just Energy Transition among other pre-existing structural challenges. This paper calls on developing countries to tighten their ship in retaining capital and limiting the illicit exportation capital towards realizing the Just Energy Transition.

Over the past few decades, we have seen an emerging form of neoliberal discourses on Africa that focus on emergence, as the continent has moved from being framed as the world’s “problem case” to the exciting new frontier of “Africa Rising". This has pushed neoliberal capitalists to see Africa as a continent of the future that is about to achieve transformations and socio-economic progress if it follows the orthodox advice of opening its market and accepting negative integration into the world economy. However, fuelled heavily by GDP growth rates, the “rising” narrative has been adept at obscuring a reality of widening wealth inequality and persistent poverty among the majority sections of the continent’s population even while witnessing the emergence of mega shopping malls and cell phones in almost every hand. Additionally, the myth of an Africa that achieves growth has overshadowed the quality of this growth as it does not lead to an improvement in the living conditions of Africans but instead breeds illicit financial flows (IFFs).

Climate finance is critical in addressing climate change because of the large-scale investments required for the climate transition. Climate finance refers to local, national or transnational financing – drawn from public, private and alternative sources of financing that seek to support mitigation and adaptation actions that will address climate change. The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, the Kyoto Protocol and the Paris Agreement call for financial assistance from Parties with more financial resources to those that are less endowed and more vulnerable to the adverse effects of climate change. Despite the gathering momentum when it comes to climate finance, developed nations have so far failed to meet their long-standing climate pledges. Developed countries fall significantly short of their commitment to contribute $100 billion annually to support climate actions in developing nations. There remains a substantial financial gap in climate finance in Africa, yet climate disasters cost between 5 and 15% of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) each year. According to the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (ECA), the implementation of African Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) requires nearly $3 trillion, including about $2.5 trillion between 2020 and 2030. The need to fast-track climate finance is urgent and undeniable. However, Parties should also take into account the question of financial integrity in the climate transition. Transparency International defines financial integrity as “a financial system that operates in a clean, transparent and accountable way”. Tax transparency, fiscal transparency, procurement and contract transparency, and beneficial ownership transparency are prerequisites to financial integrity.

This essay proposes an alternative to the contemporary theorization of the relationship between Illicit Financial Flows (IFFs) and Migrant Rights. Contemporary theorization of the relationship between IFFs and Migrant Rights solidified a linear correlation between human trafficking or smuggling and IFFs. It is common among existent literature to state that human trafficking and smuggling are some of the contributors to IFFs out of Africa. For instance, the High-Level Panel on IFFs from Africa noted that IFFs “typically originate from three sources: commercial tax evasion, trade mis-invoicing, and abusive transfer pricing; criminal activities, including the drug trade, human trafficking, illegal arms dealing and smuggling of contraband; and bribery and theft by corrupt government officials." Further notable is that analysis of the impact of IFFs on development usually tends to marginalize migrant (“a person outside of a State of which they are a citizen or national, or in the case of a stateless person or person of undetermined nationality, their State of birth or habitual residence”) communities in its theorization or empiricism. That is partly because contemporary development studies fail to recognize the relationship between IFFs and migrants’ right to development. Therefore, this essay is an early-stage critical theorization and a call to action for scholars to theorize the relationship between IFFs and migrant rights to development.

The Gabonese duffel bags of cash televised in September this year demonstrate the inadequacy of existing measures to stem state-abetted graft. The African Union’s High Level Panel (HLP) on IFFs promotes policy harmonization, however, its non-binding provisions slip towards toothlessness, given that states themselves drive SIFFs. Implementing the HLP needs muscular institutional ruptures with graft. Crucially, existing anticorruption measures are crippled by the fact that SIFFs blur the lines between licit and illicit finances. Therefore, policymakers should embed anti-corruption norms within the constitution to enable the people to revolt against enduring SIFF regimes such as the Bongo dynasty.

The exponentially growing discomfort around Illicit Financial Flows (IFFs) globally is an indicator of the undesirable effects that result from the IFFs, ranging from social, economic and even political consequences. There is a general concurrence that IFFs take away substantial amounts of finances from the developing countries, which finances could otherwise be utilised in domestic investments, provision of public services such as education, security, health etc., and offsetting foreign debts. It is on this basis that discussions about IFFs in developing countries should not be postponed.

It is common knowledge that several African economies have a nagging public debt burden. However, in real terms, outside of Oceania, Africa has the lowest public debt in the world. The challenge with Africa is that most of its debt is owed to non-African creditors and the debts are contracted in foreign currency thereby exposing African countries to currency volatility. Another challenge is that these non-African creditors consider the African market as risky, thereby charging higher interest on our loans. While African countries are struggling to finance public debt which ordinarily should be within the capacity of African economies to accommodate, it is estimated that Africa loses about $140 Billion annually to corruption.