Rumors of a Political Capture

At a conservative N15 trillion Naira, the 700km Lagos-Calabar coastal highway, which will run through nine states upon completion is, by some estimates, the single most expensive infrastructure project ever embarked upon by the Nigerian government. To put the cost of the project in perspective, it is more than half of the total expenditure of N27.5 trillion budgeted by the Nigerian government for fiscal year 2024.

Considering that the outsize cost of the project alone would have been ordinarily sufficient to draw attention to it, it comes as no surprise that interest in it promptly intensified following media reports of an opaque “restrictive bidding” process in which the usual public and administrative input was not sought. Nor has it helped matters that, in the aftermath of this unusually speedy approval, the contract was awarded to Hitech Construction Company Ltd., a business entity owned by Gilbert Chagoury, Lebanese Nigerian billionaire and “confidante” of President Bola Tinubu.

Various civil society groups and political opponents of the Tinubu administration have criticized both the project and the manner in which it was approved and contracted to an ally of the president. Atiku Abubakar, one time Vice-President and candidate of the People’s Democratic Party (PDP) in the 2023 presidential election, lamented that the project, whose terms “continue to be shrouded in secrecy,” was approved “in violation of procurement regulations” and that the apparent involvement of the president’s son, Seyi Tinubu, and his associates on the boards of companies owned by Gilbert Chagoury represented “a clear conflict of interest.” In its response, the presidency rejected accusations of conflict of interest, insisting that the presence of the president’s son on the board of the Chagoury-owned business, which it claims dates back to 2018, has nothing to do with the fact that his father is a friend to the Chagourys.

Tinubu’s association with the Chagourys first came to light back in July 2022 when what appears to be a picture of Tinubu in conference with Gilbert Chagoury and some family members at an upscale Paris restaurant circulated online, although there are indications that their relationship goes all the way back to Tinubu’s tenure as Governor of Lagos State (1999- 2007). Seyi Tinubu’s membership of the Board of Directors of the Chagoury-owned CDK Integrated Industries illustrates, conflict of interest or not, the strength of their bond. In December, Mr. Chagoury was designated as a “confidante” of the President Tinubu among the country’s delegation to that year’s 28^th Conference of Parties (COP28), held in Dubai. In January, when Gilbert Chagoury turned 78, the presidency issued a congratulatory statement in which he was described as “a shining light in any room” and “compassionate, discerning, and totally reliable in every respect.” Reports in the Nigerian media suggest that Gilbert Chagoury owns the private jet in which Tinubu and his aides traveled to Pretoria last month to attend the inauguration of South African President Cyril Ramaphosa.    

Their friendship with the Nigerian first family apart, the Chagourys are not an unknown quantity in the upper echelons of Nigerian business and politics. In November 1997, a leading Nigerian newsmagazine, inspired in part by the reported intimacy between the Chagourys and the felonious regime of General Sani Abacha, published an exposé showing how, with commercial interests encompassing various sectors of the Nigerian economy, the family had apparently “hijacked” the country. In 2000, Gilbert Chagoury was convicted of money laundering and aiding a criminal organization having apparently helped members of the Abacha family to set up accounts in a Geneva, Switzerland, bank, thereby “enabling them to benefit from illegal transfers of over $120 million from the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN).” Chagoury, who later refunded $66 million to the Nigerian government, denied ever knowing that the money was stolen.  

If the influence of the Chagourys at the summit of Nigerian political power waned during the Obasanjo era (1997- 2007), they seem to have been restored to favor briefly under Goodluck Jonathan (2010- 2015), and while the extent of their involvement with the Jonathan family remains unclear, a misplaced bet on the outcome of the 2015 presidential election (they backed the incumbent) appears to have set them up for a spell in the wilderness until the coming of Tinubu.       

But it is not only in Nigeria that the Chagourys have won friends and influenced people, accruing fame and not a little amount of notoriety in the process. If the business success is reminiscent of what, historically, various Lebanese dynasties have accomplished in West Africa and beyond, it is worth underscoring that the rose of their connections is sometimes inextricable from its thorns. Thus, for every recognition (in 2017, Rwanda’s Paul Kagame bestowed his country’s highest honor on Gilbert Chagoury, citing the latter’s “exemplary service” as an “envoy of goodwill”), there is a shadow of wrongdoing, as seems to have been the case for instance when, back in 2019, Gilbert Chagoury agreed to pay the U.S. government $1.8 million to resolve “allegations that he conspired to violate federal election laws in a ‘straw donor’ scheme to route illegal foreign contributions to U.S. presidential and congressional candidates.”        

While the Chagourys do loom large on the Nigerian and transnational commercial and political scenes, it should be stressed that the moral of the story is not about them specifically, nor is it about President Bola Tinubu, though it should be noted that allegations of corruption have dogged the latter as recently as March 2021 when he was the subject of an Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) probe into his asset documents. Tinubu maintained that the probe was instigated by political enemies to “harass and persecute” him. Any indication that he is in the pocket of the Chagourys does not bode well for his administration, one that a cross section of Nigerians already take a dim view of.   

The point, rather, is what happens when, as elite business and family ties converge, key democratic institutions are relegated to the sideline and public faith in those institutions is gradually eroded. In a nutshell, at issue is the personalization of political power insofar as it is a crucial component of the defamiliarization of democratic norms and institutions. Frustration at elite rapine already shapes deepening youth disillusionment about the possibility of democracy in Africa.  

South Africa under Jacob Zuma (2009- 2018), where business ties between the president and his closest allies on the one hand, and the wealthy Gupta family on the other eventuated in the wholesale (pun unintended) “capture” of several state-owned businesses, is often invoked as the exemplar of this logic. Yet, if an influential strand of the French Africanist literature that dominated attention in African academic circles in the aughts is anything to go by, the “outsourcing” of power to the highest bidder, which is the basic principle here, is as old as the postcolonial African state.

Absent radical policy remedies, one can take solace in the recognition that state capture often unleashes forces and dynamics that state “captors” are themselves helpless to control. Recent events in South Africa seem to point the way forward.

Reina Patel contributed to the research for this article.