Panama and other stories

“Such a small country spread on an isthmus where the sky is clearer, the sun brighter; all your music echoes within me, like the sea in the small cell of the conch”, the great Panamanian patron-poet, Ricardo Miro, wrote in his famous poem, My country.

Idyllic as Panama is, it holds no fascination for poor folks of my country who seek the good life beyond these shores. There is a reason for this.

Panama, an isthmus of poverty, is a small country of the Americas where poor folks dream the American dream in sleeping quarters of slums, where poor folks are eager to cut away from street gangs, drug traffickers, kidnappers, robbers, and murderers.

The poor folks of my country know that our country isn’t different from Panama.

They fear kidnappers, robbers and murders who roam the urban slums and the sprawling dank caverns of the suburbia.

They are sensible too. They know how utterly stupid it is to jump from the frying pan of Ijora Badia to the fire of the slumming El Chorillo.

For its warts and all, Panama fascinates thieving elites, retired generals, crooked politicians and their spouses, greedy business moguls and captains of industry who find its “small cell of the conch” attractive to stash their stolen wealth.

Panama isn’t all about souls who seek escape from hellhole.

There is something interesting about that country only history presents as a trivial subject, something about its onetime president who was snatched by USA drug law enforcement agents for drug trafficking, racketeering and money laundering.

Enter Manuel Noriega, the former strongman of Panama.

In January 1990, he was snatched by American forces from the stark room of the Holy See where he had gone to take refuge as a fugitive.

To smoke Noriega out, the Americans turned the precinct of the Holy See into a concert venue and the small patch of land overlooking the Holy See into a helicopter hanger. They blared hard rock. They revved the engines of helicopters that were left running for days.

Noriega was beaten to his psychological game by a super power.

He succumbed to America’s “boast of heraldry, the pomp of power” and surrendered.

Panamanians didn’t piss into the American embassy in Panama City, in protest.

They remembered the Panama Canal- that singular gift of America’s power and how it grew their country’s economy for many years. They moved on with their lives.

Noriega moved on to have his day in a Miami court.

Panama is different today.

Like the Ricardo Miro’s sea that lent itself to the small cell of the conch, Panama lends itself to dubious politicians, big time crooks, greedy business moguls, sons, daughters and spouses of self-named nobles who hide their ill-gotten wealth in offshore shell companies the Panama law firm, Mossack Fonseca, creates for them.

That great poet wrote about the Panamanian idyllic of his time and carried his country’s flag everywhere in his heart. If he was alive today, he would have wept for his country, for the lost innocence, ruined beauty, broken dream, for gold turned to rust, and for the shattered reputation of his country and people.

Panama once “fitted beneath the shadow of the flag” the poet carried everywhere in his heart. That flag has been sold to scavengers and mercantilists.

Death is kind. It long spared the great poet the shame his compatriots wear like the character, Hester Prynne, in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter.

The biggest data leak in history has thrusts Panama into global limelight.

The Panama Papers reveal how thieving elites everywhere created companies to secure money and assets – in some instances, stolen public monies and ill-gotten wealth- in offshore tax havens, and how they criminally exploited poor tax regimes and the financial legal framework of Panama to shield their wealth and assets from scrutiny. In spite of the global attention the Panama Papers draw to them, they will walk away as they have always done.

Global capitalism wheels bad monies and assets around the economies of the bad boys. No matter the outcry, there would always be bad boys’ economies out there willing to shield bad monies and assets.

Mossack Fonseca will walk free as an accomplice to tax evasion and tax dodging.

It has already given hint of its alibi. “We provide company incorporation and administrative services that are widely available and commonly used worldwide. It is legal and common for companies to establish commercial entities in different jurisdictions for a variety of legitimate reasons, including… pooling of investment capital from different jurisdictions in neutral legal and tax regimes that does not benefit or disadvantage anyone investor”, Carlos Sousa, the spokesperson of Mossack Fonseca expressed early this week.

The law is an ass- only idiots place the saddle and ride on it.

Many, like Pervais Rashid, the Pakistani Information Minister, who lashed out at the former cricketer turned politician, Imram Khan, for linking the Pakistani Prime Minister, Nawaz Sharif to Mossack Fonseca, argue that “everyone has the right to do what he wants with his assets: throw them into the sea”.

For Pervais Rashid, cornering the wealth of a nation is as good as throwing the cornered wealth into the Caribbean Sea. No question: cornering and squandering the wealth of nations is the right of politically exposed persons, Rashid seems to suggest.

Here, the euphemism of the sea isn’t lost to the discerning few. Poor Rashid.

The Panama Papers implicate governance regimes that allow greedy business moguls and captains of industry to move their assets to tax havens, thereby diminishing taxable investment returns that can grow poorer nations. Sadly, too, it also implicates Politically Exposed Persons (PEPs) who feast on the wealth of nations.

How the wealth of nations is created is of little concern to them.

Mossack Fonseca argues that “politically exposed persons (PEPs) do not have to be rejected just for being so; it is just a matter of proper risk analysis and administration”.

Tell that to the poor folks of Peshawar and Mararaba who make up the fudged statistics of officialdom because PEPs corner monies meant for growing the happiness of the greatest number. Nonsense.

The Panama Papers are stories in themselves, they are stories within a story: the story of how our inimical governance system delegitimizes citizens’ entitlements and privileges few individuals who have power or who are connected to power, it is the story of greed of our governing elites, of how the system promotes the greatest happiness of the smallest number.

There are elite Nigerians who have been exposed by the Panama Papers. Several online newspapers, notably the Premium Times, have named the Sarakis, Senator Mark and General Danjuma. More names are expected in due course.

The public naming is a story in itself. Shaming is a different story, I must add.

They need to come clean, they need to tell their stories. While they dawdle, I will be sitting near the fireplace of the night, stoking burning woods. I will be there waiting, just waiting to listen to their stories. It’s story time on the Niger. Yes.