Capital-Flight and the Unconscious Building of Conducive Environment for Crime, Criminality and Violence: The Warri Perspective

Verifiable statistics, reveal that the estimated capital flight from Nigeria between 1986 and 1990, was put at $9.8 billion, with $77 billion in outflow between 1989 and 1990 alone. The CBN bulletin of 2009, shows that from 2008 to 2009, Nigeria lost a colossal sum in excess of $37 billion through capital flight.

Capital flight, comes in the form of continent-to-continent, country-to-country, state-to-state, city-to-city, local-government-to-local government and community-to-community. Often times, the discourse is centred around capital flight from country (in this context, Nigeria) to the Western world, where the Nigerian political class and elites, get flak for pilfering public funds and stashing same in foreign banks. Whilst emphasis has remain on the movement of huge sums of money from Nigeria to Europe and United States, the focus of this piece, is on the transfer of funds from Warri and other major towns and cities in the Niger Delta, to Lagos State and the Federal Capital Territory, Abuja.

Security experts, have often made it clear in public fora that violence, crime and criminality, flourish in un-governed spaces. This is evident in the seeming intractable terrorists’ activities in the North-East, other parts of Northern Nigeria as well as the unfortunate rise in cultism, ritual-related killings, violent agitations, armed robbery and other forms of crimes across the Southern States of Nigeria.

Experience in the last decade, has shown that community and opinion leaders, professionals, businessmen/businesswomen, politicians, sports personalities, entertainers and even traditional rulers, who became wealthy, unconsciously or consciously capital-flight from Warri and other major towns and cities in the Niger Delta, to Lagos and Abuja, leaving little or no investments on ground in their places of origin like Warri.

While the capital flight seems very convenient for the aforesaid categories of wealthy Niger Deltans, particularly the political class, traditional rulers and businessmen/women, they fail to realize that killing the economies of Warri and other towns in the Niger Delta, via capital- flight, is building a conducive environment for crime, criminality and violence to thrive, now and the nearest future.

Editor-In-Chief  

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