David Cameron's Comments About Nigeria's Corruption Completely Missed the Point

Right now, there seem to be a lot of camera crews roaming around in the vicinity of the Queen, waiting for her or some other member of the British elite to say something controversial or condescending about another country. Her majesty herself has been caught calling Chinese representatives "very rude" (Did they call her by her Christian name? Did they not bow properly?), a remark that apparently threatens a "golden era" in relations between the two countries (George Osborne glossing over the systematic repression of the Uighur people, the destruction of the British steel industry). And then, at a Buckingham Palace reception celebrating her 90th birthday, David Cameron was filmed telling the Queen that Nigeria and Afghanistan are "possibly the two most corrupt countries in the world".

Nobody denies that in Nigeria, as in Afghanistan, there is corruption. For decades, Nigerian elites have siphoned off hundreds of billions of dollars. They were aided and abetted by outsiders from foreign governments and multi-national companies eager to profit from the exploitation of natural resources and the Nigerian people. After he interviewed his country's former president, Olusegun Obasanjo, a Nigerian journalist told me that if Obasanjo wasn't worth "at least $20 billion, then he wasn't trying".

But allegations of corruption have been the dominant political issue in Nigeria for many years. So much so that, last year, Nigerians elected a former military dictator – now reformed as a democrat – as president. This was partly on the strength of his ironclad reputation as a fighter of corruption, partly on the strength of his opponent's administration's entire section wikipedia [entry](Right now, there seem to be a lot of camera crews roaming around in the vicinity of the Queen, waiting for her or some other member of the British elite to say something controversial or condescending about another country. Her majesty herself has been caught calling Chinese representatives ), "Corruption in Nigeria". Thus far, President Muhammadu Buhari has stayed true to his word. By anyone's standards (including David "Offshore" Cameron's), he's an uncorrupt leader. By the standards of his predecessors, he's practically Ned Flanders. In his first year in power, he has made tackling corruption a priority and there have been no scandals involving his government. This counts as progress.

The problem then, is not what was said about corruption in Nigeria, but who said it and how. In the run-up to an international summit on corruption being held in London this week, at which the Nigerian president will give a keynote address entitled, "Why we must tackle corruption together", David Cameron once again revealed is blithe indifference to the idea that an international problem like corruption might have anything to do with him or his country.

He may as well have turned to the Queen and said, "The natives are coming over here so we can teach them a thing or two about good governance. Terribly dreary, I know, but apparently they didn't get the lesson the first time round. Now what's a PM to do to get a top-up in this place?"

As Cameron showed off to the Queen (it's been suggested that he knew he could be heard by the cameras), it was left to Justin Welby, the Archbishop of Canterbury, to point out that Buhari is "not actually corrupt" and that the current Nigerian government is working very hard on the issue of corruption.

He might have added that corruption in Nigeria does not exist in a vacuum. So often when these issues are discussed, the underlying assumption is a colonial one: these Africans and Afghans just can't help being corrupt, it's in their nature, the moment they emerge from their mothers they're asking for bribes.

Not to over-analyse a 45-second clip too much, but that's what I see when I see David Cameron standing inside a palace "educating" his monarch on the problems of the world. Not only does the discussion around corruption here ignore Nigeria's colonial history – an area ruled over for the benefit of foreign powers for a number of years; a country created by the British in a hurry and with no real consideration for interests of ordinary people – it also ignores the fact that the proceeds of Nigerian corruption are often kept in the City of London and that, ever since it was created, foreign interests have sucked money out of Nigeria.

In 2012, I sat in Southwark Crown Court as James Ibori, a former governor of Nigeria's Delta State, was found guilty of money laundering and conspiracy to defraud. Ibori had been accused of stealing $250 million from the Nigerian public purse. In actual fact, it was probably much more than that, but his conviction was a rare victory in the fight against corruption. There was, of course, nothing to worry about for the British financial institutions that aided Ibori. None of the banks, including Barclays, where he had several accounts, suffered for their failure to sound alarm bells over his transactions, one of which saw £1.5 million, mostly in cash, pass over the counter.

When he was asked about Cameron's comments, Muhammadu Buhari said, "I don't want an apology, I want a return of assets." He knows there's corruption in his country, but he also knows that corruption is a global problem. In his address to the corruption summit this week, Buhari will urge the international community to move faster on the dismantling of safe havens for the proceeds of corruption and the return of stolen funds and assets to their countries of origin. Safe havens, as we've all been reminded of by the Panama Papers, are a British specialty.

This was something that Cobus de Swardt, managing director of the anti-corruption group Transparency International, pointed out when commenting on David Cameron's remarks. "We should not forget," de Swardt said, "that by providing a safe haven for corrupt assets, the UK and its Overseas Territories and Crown Dependencies are a big part of the world's corruption problem".

In an article in the Guardian today, David Cameron talked about solving these issues. How nice that he can once again put himself at the head of a global effort to look important.

Inside Buckingham Palace, he struck a different tone. A glass of something nice in his hand, he still gets to play at being the great civilising man of empire, the white man atop the mighty steed, riding into the village to show the drum-beating locals a thing or two about the Westminster model. Corruption isn't a British problem and it isn't a global problem. It's an African problem, or an Asian problem and by George we're going to put these baffling foreigners in a room and give them a good talking to about the David Dos and David Don't of good governance. We're going to tackle corruption everywhere else but Britain. We're going to clean up the world. For the Queen.

This article was updated on the 12th May to account for David Cameron's Guardian article.

@oscarrickettnow

More from VICE:

The British Politicians Serving the World's Super-Rich

How to Tell When a Politics Meme Is Bullshit

Why You Should Give a Shit About the BBC White Paper