Illicit Financial Flows: NGO calls for unified African response

ActionAid Nigeria has called on African leaders to adopt a unified response in tackling illicit financial flows, to realise the objective of making the continent’s resources work for its citizens.

The anti-poverty agency made the call on Sunday while addressing newsmen in Abuja on the outcome of the African Development Week (ADW) in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, from March 31 to April 5.

The event was organised by African Union and Economic Commission for Africa with the theme: “Towards integrated and coherent approach to the implementation, monitoring and evaluation of Agenda 2063, and the SDGs.”

The ADW ended just as news of illicit financial flows by many world leaders and multinational companies were revealed in the massive leak of files known as the Panama Papers.

Mr Tunde Aremu, the Policy, Advocacy, Campaigns and Communications Manager of ActionAid Nigeria, said it was possible to achieve 20 goals of Agenda 2063 and 17 goals of SDGs.

He said these were possible if leaders provided mechanisms to implement the recommendations of Mbeki Panel on Illicit Financial Flows.

“The implementation of the recommendations of Thabo Mbeki-led Panel on Illicit Financial Flows is a strategic step towards Africa becoming less dependent on aid and using its own resources for its development.

“African leaders therefore have to take a unified position on ending the wholesale stealing of the continent’s resources,” he said.

Also, Luckystar Miyandazi, Tax Power Campaign Africa Coordinator, ActionAid International, said African leaders’ quest to harness the continent’s resources for positive socioeconomic transformation required plugging all revenue loopholes.

“The continent has to unite to tackle tax avoidance practices by multinationals and large corporations that have continued to bleed the continent and cause its citizens to live in abject poverty.

“Issues of over-invoicing of input into production by multinationals, in-trading, transfer pricing and mispricing and other tax avoidance practices of multinationals, which are hard to track, must be tackled first.

“This is however only possible where there is a common vision, a common protocol, and a unified response from all African Union member states,’’ she said.

Miyandazi urged African leaders to address possibility of trade harmonisation and one African market.