Introduction
This project was borne out of the need to explain the pervasive poverty in Africa’s mostly patrimonial. Whilst AU Watch recognizes the matrix of reasons that keep Africa poor, we agree with Geraldine Bedell (2009) of The Guardian newspaper who wrote that “amount of aid, debt relief or trade is not going to make a difference until the problems of corruption are solved: “Corruption is problem number one, two and three on that continent.” On the particular issue of corruption, one of the arguments made by AU Watch is that the continuous accretion of state power and authority dramatized under Africa’s confusing and contradicting political systems state was a logical extension of the neo-patrimonial state, where state managers are only interested in mobilizing and controlling resources for personal rather than national resources. Corruption unfortunately has become more entrenched. The thieves have become bolder. A 2002 AU study estimated that corruption cost the continent roughly $150 billion a year. It is feared that in 2016 it could be over $170 billion. Yet in that same period it received $22.5 billion in aid from developed countries. Honestly, step back and repeat slowly $150 billion! Do we really need complex economic and political explanations that why we are wallowing in the mire of poverty? Have we not made our problems worse?

But Africa has been ably assisted by foreign banks and multi-nationals. ‘The Trillion Dollar Scandal Study’ by the campaigning and advocacy group ‘ONE’, says developing countries’ efforts to fight poverty, disease and hunger are being damaged by “a web of corrupt activity” that siphons hundreds of billions of dollars from their economies every year. In sub-Saharan Africa alone, it says, the money recovered would pay for the education of 10 million children a year; cover the cost of 500,000 primary school teachers; provide antiretroviral drugs for more than 11 million people with HIV and Aids, and buy almost 165m vaccines. Quaker-Dukubo (2000: 10), quoting French Africanist scholar, J. F. Bayart, argues that the use of such terminologies as “‘prebendalism’, ‘patrimonial’ or ‘neo-patrimonialism’” does not tell the full story of state corruption and poor governance in Africa, especially in states like Sierra Leone, Guinea and Liberia. Instead he argues that such states should be described as “’la politique du ventre’ – sheer ‘kleptocracy’ glamorized and elevated as a system of governance.” That partly explains the enduring predatory nature of the African state and its inherent security crisis.

It is useful to reproduce en bloc another important study by Rex A. McKenzie (2016) to understand the pernicious and pervasive nature of corruption in Africa. He wrote: “According to (Kar and Spanjers, 2015, cited in Bond 2016: 23), Sub-Saharan Africa as a whole lost 6.1 percent of GDP annually to Illicit Financial Flows (IFFs). According to Global Financial Integrity (GFI), 2015, (ibid), between 2004 and 2013, IFFs cost South Africa $21 billion per year and $18 billion per year in Nigeria. Africa has a level of illicit capital flows is staggeringly high (Kumar, 2014). According to Bond (2016), the charge that Africa is ‘Resource Cursed’ fits the data well. The African Development Bank (2013) African Economic Outlook estimates $319 billion in illicit outflows between 2001-10, with the most coming from, “Metals, $84bn; Oil, $79bn; Natural gas, $34bn; Minerals, $33bn; Petroleum and coal products, $20bn; Crops, $17bn; Food products, $17bn; Machinery, $17bn; Clothing, $14bn; and Iron & steel, $13bn”. Recently President Buhari of Nigeria announced that the previous Jonathan regime stole $17.5 billion worth of oil between 2011-2014, yet many Lagos, Abuja and many cities in Nigeria suffer from power cuts and according to UNICEF no fewer than 10.5 million Nigerian children are out of school.