Mr Okoronkwo knew the $2,105,263 payment represented a bribe from Addax in exchange for his influencing the NNPC, that the payment did not represent client funds but rather illicit income, and the $45,000 in gross income represented in his individual tax return did not include the multimillion-dollar bribe payment he had received, the filings said.
Mr Okoronkwo will be arraigned in the coming weeks and faces up to 10 years in prison upon conviction. A separate forfeiture proceeding was underway to recover Mr Okoronkwo’s ill-gotten yields, including a home he bought in cash for $983,200 in 2017 from the proceeds.
Meanwhile, here in Nigeria, the Africa Network for Environment and Economic Justice, ANEEJ, has lauded the Federal Bureau of Investigation for levying three-count bribery and tax-related charges against Mr Okoronkwo.
Acting Executive Director of ANEEJ, Mr Leo Atakpu, condemned the exploitation of Nigeria’s resources by individuals entrusted with positions of authority, which disproportionately affects the majority of citizens.
Read also: Plunder, squander, and pillage
Atakpu expressed satisfaction with the development from the FBI, emphasising that the United States, as the host of the December tenth Conference of State Parties on Anti-Corruption, was demonstrating its commitment to combating corruption by meeting out severe penalties.
“ANEEJ underscores the importance of international cooperation in combating illicit financial flows, which significantly undermine the economies of developing nations like Nigeria and contribute to global insecurity,” the group said.
ANEEJ further called for intensified efforts by the United States, Europe, and other global stakeholders to crack down on perpetrators of financial malfeasance.
Atakpu recalled that during COPS 10, ANEEJ engaged in discussions with US government officials advocating for stricter sanctions against kleptocrats from Nigeria and other impoverished nations who exploit the US as a haven for laundering illicit finances.
“In light of the prevailing economic challenges facing Nigeria, exacerbated by corruption at the highest echelons of government, ANEEJ calls upon President Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s administration to redouble its efforts in the fight against corruption,” he stated.
Chibok Girls (after ten years)
Many of the Chibok girls who returned home, some of whom gave birth while in captivity, have been shunned by their communities, stigmatised for becoming victims of the Islamist militants. There has also been resentment in parts of the northeast over the publicity given to the girls. Illustration.
While some were freed or escaped, the authorities’ waning interest and ongoing mass abductions by militants have left campaigners and families of missing pupils in despair.
When her Boko Haram captors told Margret Yama she would be going home, she thought it was a trick. She and the other girls kidnapped from their school in Chibok, in north-east Nigeria’s Borno state, had been held for three years and had been taunted before about the possibility of release.
Conditions where they were being held in Sambisa Forest were harsh. Food and water were limited, the work was hard, and the surveillance from the Islamist militants was suffocating. But then came the day in May 2017 when the girls were escorted to a Red Cross convoy on the edges of the forest.
Yama watched as a team of negotiators orchestrated their exchange for Boko Haram prisoners. The group’s leaders withdrew back into the forest, and the girls were freed and driven to Banki, a town on the border between Nigeria and Cameroon, where a military helicopter picked them up.
Read also: Survey says 40% of Nigerian parents pay bribes for students’ pass marks
Yama was one of 82 girls recovered that month after negotiations between the militants and the Nigerian authorities. The government had been under intense pressure to secure the release of all 276 Chibok girls, who were abducted from their state school dormitories in April 2014 in a kidnapping that made headlines globally.
Boko Haram, which emerged as a jihadist movement in north-east Nigeria in 2009, literally means “western education is forbidden.” Fuelled by resentment of corruption and the marginalised existence and lack of jobs in the north, Islamist insurgencies had killed nearly 350,000 people by 2020 and displaced more than two million others, according to the UN Development Programme.
Ten years on, many of the Chibok abductions, now women, have been freed or escaped, but about 100 are still missing. Those who returned home, some of whom gave birth while in captivity, have often been viewed as Boko Haram collaborators and shunned by their communities.
Sources have told the Guardian there are no negotiations under way for the release of the remaining girls, despite assurances given to parents by the Borno authorities. So why are so many girls believed to be still in captivity, and what has been done to help those who were recovered?
The Chibok abduction on the night of 14 April 2014 was not the first time schoolchildren had been targeted by militants, nor has it been the last. Months before, 29 boys were killed at a school in Yobe State. In 2018, Boko Haram kidnapped dozens of girls in Yobe, and in 2020, more than 300 boys were abducted from schools in Katsina State.
But Chibok has become the most notorious example of Nigeria’s security crisis.
