Besides wars, disease, and violent militant groups, few forces have undermined law-based states in recent times as profoundly as corruption. Nowhere is its human cost more visible than in Nigeria. Broken roads, overcrowded classrooms, and failing hospitals are not abstract policy failures; they are the everyday consequences of public money stolen from the people. Yet a fundamental question remains largely unanswered, both in Nigeria and globally: who owns the proceeds of corruption?
In Ownership of Proceeds of Corruption in International Law, anti-corruption and human rights lawyer Kolawole Olaniyan offers a simple but radical answer: the people do.
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Africa loses tens of billions of dollars each year to corruption and illicit financial flows. Over decades, the cumulative losses are staggering. Nigeria alone is often estimated to have lost hundreds of billions of dollars since independence through corruption, mismanagement, and capital flight. The most infamous example is former military ruler Sani Abacha, who looted an estimated US$6–9 billion during the 1990s.
The urgency of this debate is underscored by the latest Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI) published by Transparency International. The annual CPI ranks countries on perceived public sector corruption, with lower scores indicating higher corruption. Nigeria’s position has oscillated at the lower end of the scale for years, reflecting persistent challenges in governance, accountability, and the rule of law. Despite modest progress in some sectors, the country’s score remains well below the global average, signalling that ordinary citizens continue to perceive corruption as pervasive in public life. This context amplifies the importance of reforming how stolen assets are recovered and used — so that recovery efforts visibly benefit the public rather than reinforcing cynicism about impunity.
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Much of Abacha’s theft was effected through direct cash withdrawals from the Central Bank of Nigeria, authorised on the pretext of “urgent” national security needs. These funds were subsequently moved abroad and concealed in foreign jurisdictions. Nearly three decades later, Abacha-linked assets are still being recovered from Switzerland, the United Kingdom, the United States, and elsewhere.
Yet recovery raises a deeper problem. When stolen assets are returned, to whom should they go—and who decides how they are used?
That question gained renewed prominence at the 11th session of the Conference of the States Parties to the United Nations Convention against Corruption (UNCAC), held in Doha, Qatar, from 15–19 December 2025. Asset recovery — recognised under Chapter V of the Convention as a “fundamental principle” — featured prominently in deliberations among States Parties, international organisations, and civil society.
More fundamentally, debates at the conference exposed the limits of an asset-recovery regime that remains overwhelmingly state-centred. Civil society participants stressed that treating governments as the sole “victims” of corruption ignores the reality that corruption deprives citizens of education, healthcare, livelihoods, and dignity. Meaningful asset recovery, they argued, must go beyond inter-state agreements and technical cooperation to incorporate victim participation, public oversight, and transparency in decisions concerning returned assets.
Nigeria’s experience illustrates this tension. Some repatriated Abacha assets have been earmarked for social programmes, including conditional cash transfers implemented with international oversight. While such arrangements are an improvement on opaque returns to general government accounts, they remain largely technocratic and top-down. Citizens have had little role in setting priorities or monitoring outcomes. As a result, recovery efforts often feel distant from the lived realities of those harmed by corruption, reinforcing public cynicism that justice remains incomplete.
International anti-corruption law has traditionally treated corruption as a crime against the state. Under this logic, recovered assets are returned to governments on the assumption that they represent the public interest. In practice, this assumption is deeply flawed. In countries like Nigeria, state institutions have at times been captured by the same elites responsible for looting public wealth. Without meaningful safeguards, asset recovery risks recycling corruption rather than repairing its harm.
Olaniyan’s work reframes the debate by arguing that corruption is not merely a violation of state rules but an infringement of people’s ownership and sovereign rights. Public resources are held in trust for citizens; when they are stolen, it is the people — not abstract state entities — who are dispossessed. From this perspective, citizens have legitimate ownership claims over proceeds of corruption and a right to participate in decisions about how recovered assets are used.
This shift matters. If corruption is understood as a crime against people, asset recovery must be designed around victims’ access to justice. Recovered funds should be deployed in ways that are transparent, accountable, and visibly beneficial — such as funding specific schools, hospitals, or social programmes subject to public oversight. Without this, recovery remains a legal exercise detached from social repair.
The Nigerian case also highlights another uncomfortable truth: grand corruption is not purely domestic. Nigeria’s stolen wealth did not hide itself. It was accommodated by foreign banks, shell companies, real estate markets, and professional enablers in some of the world’s richest countries. Olaniyan’s analysis exposes how international law often protects states and financial centres more effectively than victims — and why recovery efforts remain partial without accountability for those who facilitate corruption abroad.
Oxford University Press describes Olaniyan’s seminal book as “the first comprehensive study on the issue of people’s sovereign and ownership rights of proceeds of corruption.” Indeed, Olaniyan proposes theoretical and legal frameworks for victims to recover proceeds of corruption and enjoy access to justice, thus bringing this global dimension into focus.
For Nigeria — and for Africa more broadly — the question of ownership is not academic. It goes to the heart of legitimacy, accountability, and justice. When people see stolen money returned but remain excluded from decisions about its use, trust erodes further and corruption appears permanent.
Recognising that the proceeds of corruption belong to the people will not eliminate corruption overnight. But it would fundamentally change how recovery is imagined and practised, shifting the focus from diplomatic transactions between states to reparative justice for citizens.
In a country where corruption has shaped leadership at every level and made life, in Hobbes’ words, “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short,” Ownership of Proceeds of Corruption in International Law is a timely and important contribution. It offers government officials, lawyers, practitioners, journalists, scholars, and students a framework for rethinking asset recovery — not as symbolism, but as justice and accountability.
Eze Anaba is editor, Vanguard Newspaper and president, Nigerian Guild of Editors (NGE).
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