The Covid situation has focused -or should have – the Western Consumerist masses on the Third World. The term Third World has been replaced by smug western elite media by the euphemism ‘The Developing World.’ A rose by any other names would smell as sweet. So renaming the Third World does not hide the all pervading stink of corruption and exploitation.

R,J Cook

Africa , with massive resources, ruled by corrupt dictators ,is the world’s second-largest and second-most populous continent, after Asia in both cases. Africa’s population will double by 2050. The average African woman has 15 children. Disease is rife and endemic. At about 30.3 million km² including adjacent islands, it covers 6% of Earth’s total surface area and 20% of its land area. With 1.3 billion people as of 2018, it accounts for about 16% of the world’s human population. Wikipedia Area: 30.37 million km²Population: 1.216 billion (2016)Largest city: Lagos

June 22nd 2022

White Lies

European monarchies and elites grew very rich exploiting Africa’s land and resources, none more so than Britain who also had a strranglehold on India and Middle East, working in cahoots with local leaders. When they left they ensured puppet ethnic dicator governments were in situ to maintain that stranglehold.

‘COVID will come back to haunt us from Africa’ (msn.com)

Comment on above. The comfortable white and black rich elite have exploited the George Floyd police murder to amplify BLM and divert attention from facing the truth about Africa and the western World’s black negroid culture. Ordinary blacks are being encouraged to scapegoat poor whites – leading to white resentment because it is offensive nonsense to blame all whites for slavery and calling them privileged.

No doubt vaccine take up is troubled in Africa due to fertility and religious issues. That does not mean that vaccines are the answer. Africa like the whole third world and Latin America is obsessed with religion and the after life. The rich like this trick and used it n the poor whites during the Industrial Revolution. Overpopulation encourages disease , but the elite want the cheap labour. They also used it to divide and rule their empires.

R J Cook

Democracy Now! <digest@democracynow.org>

The South African

www.thesouthafrican.com

The South African

English-language South African daily online newspaper

The South African is an English-language South African online news publication created in March 2003 by the multinational media company, Blue Sky Publications, and it operates as an online news and lifestyle publication with offices in South Africa and the United Kingdom. The publication started as a London-based broadsheet newspaper aimed at providing news for South Africans living in London.

THE IMPACT OF RACIAL INEQUALITY IN SOUTH AFRICA – July 29th 2021

The World Bank recently released a 147-page report extensively detailing the root causes of economic struggle in South Africa. Researchers found that one of the most prominent factors behind poverty is racial inequality in South Africa.

Apartheid, the government-enforced segregation and discrimination against non-white people, came to an end in 1994 with the introduction of a racially mixed, democratically elected parliament under the leadership of Nelson Mandela. But although discriminatory policies stopped being imposed by the government, that unfortunately does not mean that racism vanished from the country. In fact, South Africa remains the most racially unequal country in the entire world.

The residual effects of apartheid have had tremendous impacts on the poverty rate, and the remnants of racial inequality in South Africa are still playing a role in the nation’s economic structure to this day.

Employment Disparities Remain After the End of Apartheid

Because apartheid took place relatively recently, many non-white people in South Africa who lived through it are still recovering from being discriminated against during that time. The report states that non-whites statistically have fewer skills, simply because they were excluded from the workforce for so long. This means that they are still more likely to be unemployed than white people. In fact, black South Africans saw a 31.4 percent unemployment rate in 2017, while among white South Africans the rate was only 6.6 percent.

Employment is hard to come by for non-whites because of how the education system was set up during apartheid. White education focused on reading, language and math, while non-white education mainly trained people to become unskilled laborers so that white people would not have to compete with non-white people for high-paying jobs.

This plan worked exactly as it was intended to, and many non-white people are doomed to a life of working low-paying jobs simply because they were never taught the skills to advance in their careers. As of last year, white South Africans still bring in an average income that is five times greater than that of black South Africans.

Race-Based Displacement Caused Lasting Inequality

Another measure taken to promote racial inequality in South Africa during apartheid was the passage of the Group Areas Act of 1950. This resulted in millions of people being forced out of their homes and sent to live in specific areas based on their race. White people were able to live in the most developed areas, while non-whites were usually placed in barren rural townships. Even if non-whites happened to live in decent areas, their neighborhoods could be demolished to make room for white residences if the land appealed to them.

Because of this mass displacement, many non-whites still live far away from developed regions (even though it is no longer mandated by law) because it is too difficult to find somewhere else to live. For instance, the Western Cape province–home to Cape Town, one of South Africa’s biggest tourist destinations–is the most developed province in South Africa. The Western Cape has the lowest black population out of all the provinces at 32 percent. However, the Eastern Cape, South Africa’s most underdeveloped province, has the highest black population at 86 percent.

The distance from their townships into more populous cities makes it harder for non-whites to find employment in commercial areas, and even if they are able to secure a job, the cost of transportation to get there is very high. In fact, the average South African commuter spends about 40 percent of his or her income on transportation.

Government Efforts to Address Racial Inequality in South Africa

The South African government has taken measures to combat poverty related to racial inequality. The first of these was the establishment of minibus taxis, a cheaper form of public transportation from rural areas into cities. This has helped alleviate some of the cost and inconvenience that comes with living outside of populous areas.

Another important step taken by the government to overcome racism was the passage of the Employment Equity Act. This act made it illegal for employers to discriminate against their workers based on race and requires employers to promote diversity in the workplace through affirmative action programs.

Though these are great initiatives for helping those who were unfairly affected by apartheid and the racism that still lingers today, much more can be and needs to be done to reduce poverty by battling racial inequality in South Africa.

– Maddi Roy
Photo: Flickr

Issues for Africans in the West – July 29th 2021

Mental Health Issues Facing the Black Community.

From Ramya Murugesh

By sharing this resource and others, we can help start a conversation about how racism and discrimination affect the mental health of the African-American community. We can help to reduce the shame and stigma sometimes associated with mental illness and mental health treatment in the Black community.

For example, did you know that:

Black Americans are 20% more likely to experience serious mental illness?
17% will develop a substance abuse disorder?
Just 1/3 will receive the help they need? (The resource includes several free or low-cost mental health treatment options.)

Amidst everything going on in our world today, this is a heavy topic and relevant to many.

If you want to learn more, please check out our link and feel free to include it on your page if it would be beneficial:

Mental Health Issues Facing the Black Community

The following universities have already shared our guide:

Columbia University
University of California, Berkeley
University of Minnesota

May 1st 2023

FGM in Sierra Leone: I believe my girlfriend died because her genitals were cut

Published

11 hours ago

Women taking part in a religious ritual — Image caption, Bondo elders pass on traditions to young women and girls in Sierra Leone

By Tamasin Ford

BBC Africa Eye

Sierra Leone has one of the highest rates of female genital mutilation (FGM) in Africa and it can sometimes end in tragedy. BBC Africa Eye has been hearing from one man who believes his girlfriend died after having her genitalia cut.

Fatmata Turay was 19 years old when her mother called her to come home to their village.

She was to be initiated into the Bondo society, a centuries-old tradition involving music and dancing where young women are prepared for adulthood.

Thirty-six hours later, Fatmata was dead.

From the day of her funeral on 18 August 2016, her boyfriend, journalist Tyson Conteh, took out his camera and started filming.

In a later recording he looked straight down the barrel of the lens to explain why he wanted to document what was happening.

“I want to use this film, which is so much passionate to me, to create a debate. Fatmata does not want to see another girl, a woman, die. That’s her wish.”

He said Fatmata had been speaking to him in his dreams, and wanted him to expose the truth of her death and put an end to the practice of FGM.

Woman looking away from the camera — Image caption, In his film, Tyson Conteh shows images of his late girlfriend Fatmata Turay

FGM involves the partial or total removal of the external female genitalia, often focusing on the clitoris.

The United Nations Population Fund has documented the practice in 92 countries, but it is most prevalent in parts of Africa and the Middle East.

In countries like Somalia, Sudan and Djibouti, a form of FGM called infibulation is practised where the labia is removed and then used to almost completely seal the vaginal orifice, leaving a small opening for urine and menstrual blood. When the woman marries, they must be cut open before they can have sex.

There are no health benefits to FGM. The World Health Organization warns it can lead to urinary, vaginal and menstrual problems, as well as complications during childbirth and death.

In Sierra Leone, it is estimated that 83% of women and girls aged between 15 and 49 have undergone FGM.

One of the main reasons for the procedure is to tame a women’s sexual desire. If they are “cut”, it is thought it will protect their virginity and once they are married, they will remain faithful to their husband.

“An uncut woman loves sex more than a cut woman. That’s why we reduce the urge in them,” said Aminata Sankoh, a soweis, the name given to the women who perform the cutting in Sierra Leone.

‘It took me a week to urinate’

Conteh got rare access to film the all-female Bondo society, an age-old bedrock of beauty, art and culture.

It is a celebration where the traditional role of a wife and mother is conferred from Bondo elders to young women.

It is seen as an expected and necessary rite of passage.

However, part of the initiation process is undergoing FGM. Conteh was not allowed to film this.

“In our culture, our people have for a long time been initiated into the society,” said Ngaima Kamara, a leading soweis.

“If you are not initiated, you will be ashamed of washing with me at the stream. If I pass by you, I will blank you. If we meet somewhere I can tell you I do not talk to an uncut woman. Like you are sick.”

In his documentary, Conteh recounted what happened to Fatmata just over a day after attending the Bondo ceremony.

“We met her body laid on a mat, just outside the house in the floor. And it was wrapped in white,” he said.

“You see the blood coming out. You see like there is blood and we realised that she had died in the Bondo society after she was mutilated.”

The police arrived and Fatmata’s body was taken to the mortuary in Makeni.

Her mother and the soweis were arrested.

Six days later, a post-mortem was carried out by Sierra Leone’s only pathologist at that time, Dr Simeon Owizz Koroma.

Woman being interviewed — Image caption, Rugiatu Turay, who has campaigned against FGM, says she was lucky to have survived being cut when she was 11

Also present was Dr Sylvia Blyden, the then minister for social welfare, gender and children’s issues.

Dr Blyden is a supporter of the right of consenting adult women to practise FGM but is strongly against underage and forced FGM.

In a public statement, she released details of the post-mortem and said FGM had nothing to do with Fatmata’s death. The soweis and Fatmata’s mother were released.

Conteh investigated the possibility of whether his girlfriend’s death was covered up to protect the Bondo society. Dr Blyden maintains she would never substitute the truth over the reputation of the Bondo society.

Rugiatu Turay, no relation to Fatmata Turay, was Dr Blyden’s deputy minister at the time and is a long-time campaigner against FGM.

She founded and runs the Amazonian Initiative Movement, an organisation in Sierra Leone focused on ending FGM.

She said she was lucky to survive after she was cut when she was 11 years old.

“Plenty people have died. We know, we all know. We should be honest,’ she said.

“I almost died. If I wanted to pee. It took me a week to be able to urinate. One week. Even after initiation ended, my vagina swelled.”

‘Bondo will end’

Ms Turay questioned why Dr Blyden was present at the post-mortem.

“Why do you allow your minister to go into a mortuary to do a post-mortem? Even if she is a doctor, she has no business there.

“She stood with the soweis. That shows that she already took sides. We believe that the result, which we never saw, was changed. We believe that. We cannot bargain the lives of women for votes.”

Dr Blyden denied speaking publicly about Fatmata’s cause of death but stands by her claim that Fatmata did not die as a result of FGM, saying the findings of the post-mortem matched Fatmata’s medical history.

She said any suggestion of a cover-up was false and malicious and added that the autopsy was conducted in full view of family, human rights organisations, police and medical personnel.

She argued that it was her duty as a minister to attend the autopsy and denied she was there for any political gain.

BBC Africa Eye approached Dr Owizz with the allegations in the film, but he declined to respond.

Four years ago, Ms Turay set up the first Bondo society without FGM, called Alternative Rites or Bloodless Bondo.

She believes that the Bondo itself could end if women do not stop practising FGM.

“If women or anybody continues to advocate the cutting in Bondo, it will reach a point when Bondo ends. It will reach a point where Bondo will stop.”

You can watch the full BBC Africa Eye documentary, FGM: For the love of Fatmata here.

July 18 2021

Three Presidents Who Opposed Covid Vaccines Have Conveniently Died, Replaced by Pro-Vaxxers

“Coincidences” always seem to favor the globalists.

by JD Rucker July 18, 2021 in Conspiracy Theory, Globalism, Healthcare, Opinions, Science, The Great Reset

We took a lot of heat last week for publishing an article speculating that Haitian President Jovenel Moïse was assassinated to usher in vaccines into his country. By “heat,” I’m not talking about the standard trolls or Twitter DMs. The site was hit by a massive wave of hack attempts that failed miserably. Praise God and thank you to my security firm!

The attacks are likely to ramp up after this article is released as it details the events surrounding two other world leaders who happen to have died to allow for Covid vaccines to be brought into their countries. Nobody other than Free West Media is covering it thus far; I searched even the fringiest sites I could find for a hint of speculation and it was notably missing. Maybe they don’t know. Yet. Maybe they’re fearful of the same types of attacks we suffered. Either way, we’re ready to spread the word.

[Update 1: As anticipated, the attacks came in quickly. This time, I was monitoring the traffic in real time. It’s conspicuous that before the surge of attacks, there was an odd amount of traffic coming from… wait for it… Washington DC and Fort Meade, Maryland.]

Here’s the article by Free West Media followed by my commentary:

Coincidence? Three presidents dead after blocking distribution of Covid vaccines

The leaders of three different countries died after having stopped the distribution of the experimental Covid-19 jabs. All three countries took the decision to distribute the vaccines to their citizens only after their leaders passed away.

One of them was Haitian President Jovenel Moise, who was assassinated at his home in Port-au-Prince recently by a group of mercenaries.

The Caribbean country has been eligible for free vaccines through the COVAX scheme, run by the World Health Organisation as well as global vaccine charities, but Moise had notably refused the AstraZeneca shots. Only days after his murder, the US dispatched vaccines to Haiti, together with a team of FBI agents.

This means that Haiti is now no longer the only country in the Western Hemisphere not to accept the Covid injection.

Soon after President John Magufuli of Tanzania had declared the vaccines dangerous, he passed away from a “heart ailment”. In February 2021, his health minister had told the media: “We are not yet satisfied that those vaccines have been clinically proven safe.” The death of the immensely popular Magufuli resulted in thousands of mourners crowding into a stadium to view his body. However, soon after Magufuli’s death, Tanzania ordered a huge shipment of the products worth millions of dollars for its 60 million citizens.

“You should stand firm. Vaccinations are dangerous. If the White man was able to come up with vaccinations, he should have found a vaccination for AIDS by now; he would have found a vaccination [for] tuberculosis by now; he would have found a vaccination for malaria by now; he would have found a vaccination for cancer by now,” Magufuli had warned in January, 2021.Little Did They Know They Were Being WatchedMighty ScoopsAds by Revcontent

Magufuli, a former chemistry teacher, also trashed PCR tests by demonstrating how a goat and a papaya fruit had both tested positive for Covid-19. Magufuli’s view on PCR tests is shared by the international trial lawyer Dr Reiner Fuellmich who has launched a historic class-action lawsuit in Germany and the US against Christian Drosten and the other scientists who created the PCR testing protocol used to “diagnose” Covid-19.

In November, 2020, an appeals court in Portugal had ruled that “the PCR process is not a reliable test for SARS-CoV-2, and therefore any enforced quarantine based on those test results is unlawful”. The judges, Margarida Ramos de Almeida and Ana Paramés, referred to several pieces of scientific evidence showing that in PCR tests with 35 cycles or more the accuracy dropped to three percent, meaning up to 97 percent of positive results could be false positives.

In March this year, an Austrian administrative court acknowledged the limitations of PCR and antigen testing in use currently, ruling that “PCR tests have no diagnostic value”. This view was echoed in April by a German court in Weimar, stating that PCR tests were not “suitable for determining an ‘infection’ with the SARS-CoV-2 virus”. It also ordered the lifting of various restrictions in the region.

Burundi was the second African country to reject Covid shots in February this year. The health minister of the African nation, Thaddee Ndikumana, told reporters that prevention was more important, and “since more than 95 percent of patients are recovering, we estimate that the vaccines are not yet necessary”.

Burundi’s late President Pierre Nkurunziza was harshly criticized for not advancing the notion of injections against SARS-CoV-2. Remarkably, the current President Evariste Ndayishimiye now describes the virus as Burundi’s “worst enemy”.

In the most vaccinated countries, like Israel, the UK or the Seychelles, and especially in Gibraltar which boasts a 100 percent vaccination rate, the alleged delta variant now doubles every 3 days. Perhaps the current 23 cases is not significant, but 23 cases in an area with 35 000 inhabitants is the equivalent of 45 000 cases per day in a country like France.

And it has been more than a month and a half since 100 percent of the population of Gibraltar was vaccinated with two doses. This “paradise” for the vaccinated vindicates the hesitation of the Africans to take part in the mass experiment.

Editor’s Commentary: Like I said in the opening, there is no way this is all just one big coincidence. We noted in the original article that among those accused of the assassination in Haiti were people on the FBI’s and NSA’s payrolls. Yes, the Deep State is very much directly involved in the globalist agenda surrounding these “vaccines.” Of that, there can be no doubt. Nothing at this scale happens without their direct involvement.

Three Presidents Who Opposed Covid Vaccines Have Conveniently Died, Replaced by Pro-Vaxxers (noqreport.com)

Freedom Just Another Name For Nothing Left To Lose – July 17th 2021

***Fire on the streets of Jo’burg July 15th 2021***

Do black lives matter to fellow blacks ? Why should they ? White people do most of the killing of white people and the same goes for blacks kiling blacks across the world. Woke liberals and lying gobal poiticians are very selective about what they mean by the term ‘equality.’ But it is easy to fool the ignorant masses.

These Asian men came FROM Bangladesh to create business in South Africa and have been burned out by Black African rioters angry about the jailing of their corrupt Black presdident who says it is racist to jail him.

***This is the world of FAKE WOKE LIBERALISM.***

Inside the World of the Black Elite: An Interview With Margo Jefferson

43.60K

Jason Parham09/29/15 03:10PM Filed to: INTERVIEWS

Upon the publication of Lawrence Otis Graham’s Our Kind of Peoplein 1999, the New York Times asked, “Is There a Black Upper Class?” On the surface, it was a foolhardy question—of course there was, and is, a black upper class—but if you were to peel back its exterior, as Graham did in his book, underneath revealed a world of race leaders: men and women and children who were in a constant “state of self-enhancement.” Here was a place, a land, very few Americans knew about.

Pulitzer-winning writer and cultural critic Margo Jefferson’s new memoir, Negroland, maps this very terrain, one on which money, privilege, and racism intersect in sometimes insidious ways. In Negroland—what Jefferson terms “a small region of Negro America where residents were sheltered by a certain amount of privilege and plenty”—lived the best of Afro-America: doctors, lawyers, entrepreneurs, teachers, and all-around strivers of the Third Race, the black aristocracy. Here in this community there were national and local clubs like Boule, Jack and Jill, the Guardsmen, Links, and black sororities and fraternities like Delta Sigma Theta and Alpha Phi Alpha, founded to ensure that blacks of a certain pedigree would “embody and perpetuate the values of the Negro elite.”

Jefferson grew up in the well-to-do environs of Chicago—Bronzeville and Park Manor—the daughter of a doctor and a socialite (her father was the head of pediatrics at Provident Hospital, one of the oldest black hospitals in the country). But the cushion of Jefferson’s world would not always be so. “Nothing highlighted our privilege more than the menace to it,” she writes. A good education, expensive clothes, fancy cars, and comfort, she discovers, would not save her, or other residents of Negroland, from the terrors of the outside world.

In Negroland, Jefferson examines her own social navigations among, and in response to, the white world, and is equally critical of the cracks that splinter the foundation on which her own people stand: hierarchies based on skin color, wealth, “passing,” and status within social circles. “I’m a chronicler of Negroland, a participant-observer, an elegist, dissenter, and admirer; sometime expatriate, ongoing interlocutor,” she confesses in the book’s opening pages.

Yet despite the security of Negroland and her later successes, Jefferson admits she began to harbor feelings of depression. “Negroland girls couldn’t die outright. We had to plot and circle our way toward death, pretend we were after something else, like being ladylike, being popular, being loved… In the late 1970s, I began to actively cultivate a desire to kill myself.” This admission, and others, is a reminder that the everyday realities for those living within the world of the black bourgeoisie were far from pristine.

I recently spoke with Jefferson via phone.

The black aristocracy is not a subject that is often written about, especially with such a critical eye. It’s a welcome book in such an interesting time in history.

Yes. Very true. It is indeed an interesting time in history. [laughs]

Interesting is not necessarily the right word.

Well, interesting covers a range: from surprising to appalling. We can cover a lot of ground with that.

Right. So in the last decade alone: from, let’s say, the election of President Obama to the current state of black men and women getting killed at such a rapid pace. So by interesting, I guess I mean to say, the book arrives during a time of—

—what appears to be absolute progress mixed with these revelations of continuing, extending brutalities.

Did you always expect to write this book?

Not always. I started to really think about it, consciously let’s say, around 2007 or 2008. I’d worked on a couple of theater pieces through an institute that Anna Deavere Smith ran that used this material. That’s when it settled in my mind as material I could put out in the open. I did not start working on it until later. In 2008 I got a Guggenheim Fellowship; I applied and started writing it. And then life intervenes and you get slowed down, but I knew that I had to finish this.

The book operates in varying ways: it’s part social history, part memoir, part insider’s tale. When you began to seriously write Negroland, was the intention to purposefully construct it in this way?

I didn’t always know. It was only my second book. On Michael Jackson had been a book-length essay, and maybe the one thing they have in common is that they aren’t following a straightforward sequence—they move by theme and association. That structure, even in terms of reading, always appeals to me. When I thought about a memoir, and really got working, I knew I wanted it to be doubled. Meaning: a cultural memoir and a personal memoir; mapping a relationship with this world, with all of its tensions, and links to the larger white and larger black world. But I am also the character—watching, being affected—so in that way, it was a personal memoir. The world itself is so full of changes—of negotiations, changes of position, seeing things one way, then another, gauging responses, status changes that can happen in an instant. I felt the structure needed to reflect all those social shifts, political shifts, cultural shifts, and swings of mood and of status.

Let’s talk about the status within that world. You refer to the black bourgeoisie as “the Third Race.”

That’s how we thought of ourselves. And that really starts before W.E.B. DuBois. It’s modern name was the Talented Tenth, the race leaders. The people who are educated, who are cultivated. This Victorian-into-modern sense of achievement. And of also: cultivation, education, dignity. All of these things were, in today’s parlance, respectability politics. They were to prove, to refute bigotry’s claims, and to prove, as a people, we deserved equal rights and were progressing and moving and could equal the best of white people. That’s the lineage.

Growing up in Chicago, how early on did you recognize the scope of your privilege?

For a child, for the black bourgeois, the scope—and I think this is true for any group that has been discriminated against, oppressed, and whose status is always contested—varies. Within an all-black world, it felt very, very secure. How is this manifested? By material things—your house, clothes, by manners, by the schools you go to, by what your parents say to you about how you’re supposed to carry yourself in the world. It always shifts when you move into various parts of the white world. Then you are contending with much shakier status. You start learning that your privilege can be challenged or disregarded at any minute. You’re learning those things almost simultaneously.

What’s the earliest example of your security being challenged in the white world?

The earliest one I am conscious of, in fact, is when I’m in elementary school. I come home and ask my mother questions; mind you, I’m at a school I feel very comfortable in; it was a progressive school, not a lot of incidents, and I had real friends. So I say to my mother, some other student has asked me if we’re rich and upper class. I was young, and thought, Oh, how nice. I thought this was flattering. My mother’s answers made finally clear to me that what was implied—and, of course, this child didn’t know that; it was coming from the parents—was that this little Negro girl and her mother, who seems to be driving a car as nice as mine and seems to speak standardized English, were asking what kind of status did we have. You know, what kind of status do they have? I suppose in their world they are upper class. She must have overheard a lot of speculation. It was basically saying: what oddities are these people given the inferior race they’re from. That, with my mother making clear to me, we were going to be negotiating between our own world, in which we were considered upper class, the larger American world, in which we’d be considered bourgeoisie, and the world dominated by racism—by white constructs of race—in which we would just be considered a mass of Negroes that they really didn’t have want to bother with and didn’t think well of.Negroland: A Memoir

Early on you write that Negroland women wanted to be seen as ladies, not necessarily “black.” It reminded me of that Ralph Ellison passage from Invisible Man where the narrator meets Brother Jack, and Brother Jack asks, “Why do you fellows always talk in terms of race?” and he responds, “What other terms do you know?” There is a similar push and pull in the book; citizens within Negroland do not always want to be identified as black, but the world continues to push color and these constructs onto them, even as they pull away.

It’s a question of free space. There was certainly within Negroland race pride and race consciousness, along with snobbery and over identification with white values. We were always supposed to be aware that we were to help carry the race forward, but what you want is free space to simply live your life and be yourself. Everyone wants that. You don’t want to have no choice. With race consciousness—which is always problematic; yes there is race pride, but when it is being forced on you from the outside white world, you’re not controlling it, when you’re not in control of that consciousness, those questions, those criticisms—you can be turned into a sociological object, an object of scorn, a test case, at any point. You have no control over that. You have control over how you respond to it, but not over its intrusion into your life—your external life and your interior life.

This response then becomes a sort of performance.

Yes. Absolutely. Even the anticipation of it. Maybe it’s not going to happen this time, but you better be ready in case it happened. There’s a constant vigilance and weariness, and then the performance. Which, again, has to be shaded and altered according to white characters; some intrusions are very subtle and some are quite blatant.

Beauty comes up in the book often. This notion of skin color as it relates to degrees of privilege, which is really a larger conversation about ownership and who dictates what is acceptable and what is not acceptable. I imagine navigating that landscape within Negroland—with its strict guidelines of beauty and decorum—must have been more difficult that having to navigate that terrain outside Negroland.

I thought you were going to say in a different period, because it’s all more fluid and flexible and generous now. Starting with, I would say, Black Power, those very constricted standards of Anglo-Saxon beauty got challenged and pushed out. Everything started to change, change, change.

Historically, these divisions—whereby lighter was better, thinner noses; let’s just say Anglo-Saxon looks—go back several centuries. These divisions and hierarchies started as soon as blacks arrived and mingled with each other, began to intermingle with white people, and were divided into house servants, field hands, free Negroes, not. All of these markers—what color you were, what you looked liked—had huge social and political consequences. They got passed on, not surprisingly, and really ruled in a society that was Anglo-Saxon. And I say that very specifically, because other immigrant groups who register as white were also aspiring to Anglo-Saxon models. That was what you were living up to.

We’re talking about physical markers; one of the key distinguishing facts for Negroes, black people, African Americans, was that we could be judged, categorized, dismissed, or abused instantly on the ground of visibly registering as Negro in some way. These markers of skin, features, all of that, became a determinant of one’s fate. Now place that on women, and black women therefore are bringing this body of prejudice and consequence into this maniacal, rigorous world whereby women are judged by excruciating visual standards, along with manners. All of which, again, is very white and very Anglo-Saxon, and which black women had been systematically excluded from so they could in no way live up to notions of being beautiful, being a good mother, being respectable, being virtuous.

That must take a traumatic toll, psychological and physical, on the body for black women.

Well, I wouldn’t say it’s always traumatic. But it’s very demanding. It certainly has its moments. If you look at a novel like The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison; there’s an example of trauma. If you look at a novel like Quicksand or Passing by Nella Larsen there’s an element of trauma, but also there are social complications and navigations. These become stories of extremely complicated, demanding, and sometimes killing, manner.

Which sort of leads me to my next question. I want to talk about, as you write, that “sanctioned, forbidden space between white vulnerability and black invincibility.” Despite all the privileges Negroland had provided, it could not guard you from depression and thoughts of suicide.

Everyone is driven in a different way. The burden of being a constant symbol, of having to live up to a symbol of advancement, of progress, of being perfect in some way and always representing the destiny of an entire people—that is supposed to be invincibility. That’s enormous. That translates often in black life, or translated traditionally into admonishes along the lines of, No, you can’t fail; You can’t show that kind of grief or despair, depression, because it was a kind of failure.

A weakness.

It can be a major weakness if you give way to it. And it can defeat you, and it shows that they’ve won. Sometimes we even used to be told, We don’t commit suicide, we’re too strong for that. These are battle weapons, aren’t they? This sense, this charge, to be invincible, and not to give way even in private, as if momentary despair, grief, melancholy, even if giving into them for a moment, could weaken you like a toxin in your system, could render you not fit for the life battle. This was exhausting. For me, and I’m not alone in this, giving into and residing in, for real periods of despair and depression, became a kind of rest space.

What do you mean by “rest space”?

A space retreat—I’m not responsible to anything in the larger world right now. I need respite. And also: I need to acknowledge, whatever despair and depression do, the toll the grief is taking on me. I need to acknowledge the toll certain parts of my life are taking on me. I have to do that, even if it temporarily paralyzes me to suppress it. Otherwise, paradoxically, I can’t go on. When I can reside in that, and recoup, then I can continue. In a strange way it’s a survival method.

Had you not been recognizing that grief before?

As people who grapple with depression, there’s the other side—I’m vivacious, lively; as a child I had really performed. And I enjoyed the performance. Like many people, and this in not unusual, I began to discover the successfully hidden aspects of myself when I got to college. Also, let’s remember, I got to college in 1964; the world was in tumult. You were exposing yourself and revealing yourself, and throwing whatever feelings you had into all of these passionate movements and discussions; you were writ large. The world was upending, helping upend the way you’d lived before and thought before. So, of course, that leads to all kinds of inner tumult. You can’t protect the inner psyche from the changes the world is asking of you.

But even in this inner tumult, you write: “You must set an example for other Negroland girls who suffer the same way. You must give them a death they can live up to.” Amidst both internal and external changes, you still carried this sense of uprightness you’d learned as a child.

It stayed with me. But I am, as they say in literature, being bitterly ironic there. That was a moment. That was one of my temporary resolutions. I say, Ok, If I’m going to kill myself then I want that to be an example and help set a pattern that will be useful for Negro girls or black women who want to do the same. I didn’t want it to be squalid or worthless; I wanted it to be distinctive, noteworthy. Even then, I wanted to excel at it.

What are you hoping readers take away from the book?

That the work and the play, the entanglement of an individual life, with a world, with a society, with these larger forces, this constant push-pull between who are you are, the solitary character, and what the demands of the world, from your family to society, what they are are, and what’s being made between you. I hope people will also look at the power and privilege—they’re such big words, like race and gender and sex—because they manifest themselves in our lives in so many ways. I would want the book to spark readers to make those connections in their lives. We all live several lives—there’s the internal, there’s the external, there’s the life of me as a black woman, there’s the life of me as an American citizen—and we’re all doing this, and how are you faithful to those lives?

How the fall of Qaddafi gave rise to Europe’s migrant crisis – Posted July 14th 2021

Under Qaddafi, Libya worked closely with Europe to harshly stem the flow of migrants across the Mediterranean. But the country’s chaos has upended that.

Carmelo Imbesi/APSurvivors of the boat that overturned off the coasts of Libya over the weekend disembark from an Italian Coast Guard ship at Catania Harbor in Italy on Monday.

April 21, 2015

By Dan Murphy Staff writer

Two horrible tragedies in or at least near Libya: Up to 800 migrants trying to reach Europe from Africa die after their boat sinks off the coast, and 30 migrants are murdered by the so-called Islamic State on the shore in the troubled country.

Libya’s chaos has once more made it a major way station for Africans seeking a better life, as the European Union grapples with the morality of cutting back on patrols to rescue migrants. The argument for doing less is that increasing the risk of crossing the Mediterranean would save lives. Word that there was no safety net would filter back to people, many of them fleeing persecution, and they’d stop coming.

“We do not support planned search and rescue operations in the Mediterranean,” British Foreign Office Minister Joyce Anelay said last year. Rescues have “an unintended ‘pull factor,’ encouraging more migrants to attempt the dangerous sea crossing and thereby leading to more tragic and unnecessary deaths,” she argued.

It clearly hasn’t worked out that way, as The Christian Science Monitor’s Nick Squires wrote in March:

Last year, a record 170,000 refugees flooded across the Mediterranean, traveling in large part out of Libya and arriving in Italy. In January, more than 3,500 refugees and migrants reached Italy from Libya, a 60 percent increase from January 2014. They come from all over Africa and the Middle East.

The Eritreans are fleeing a brutal regime which dragoons young men into military conscription and maintains a semi-permanent war footing with neighboring Ethiopia. Syrians and Iraqis are fleeing the war and atrocities committed by the self-described Islamic State, Palestinians the open prison that is Gaza, and West Africans the crushing poverty that has framed many of their lives … The vast majority of refugees make for Libya, where a power vacuum since the 2011 fall of dictator Muammar Qaddafi has enabled gangs of human traffickers to flourish …

“Everyone in Libya is armed now,” says Djiby Diop, a 20-year-old from Senegal who spent three months in Libya dodging gunmen. “If you don’t work for them, they shoot you. If you don’t give them all your money, they shoot you. Or they shoot you just for fun.”

In some corners of Europe, there is a callousness and contempt for the migrants. Columnist Katie Hopkins called them “cockroaches” in The Sun, Britain’s largest-circulating newspaper, on Friday.

“Show me pictures of coffins, show me bodies floating in water, play violins and show me skinny people looking sad. I still don’t care,” she wrote. “What we need are gunships sending these boats back to their own country. You want to make a better life for yourself? Then you had better get creative in Northern Africa.”In Atlanta, a glimpse of why ‘defund the police’ has faltered

The callousness is far uglier in Libya itself, where local gangs prey on migrants, and racism against darker-skinned Africans is common.

The migration crisis in its current iteration stems, in part, from the fall of Libya’s Muammar Qaddafi. In 2010, Europe was moving quickly to normalize relations with the former dictator. Oil interests played a role, but so did the desire of many European nations to outsource migrant control to the North African country.

Libya’s coast has a long history of sending people – willing and unwilling – to Europe and the Americas. Ports like Tripoli and Benghazi were the final stops for medieval slave-trading caravans from the African interior until the 19th century. In recent decades, migrants have shoved off for Italy and Spain in rickety fishing boats, with Libyan officials looking the other way.

Mr. Qaddafi was well aware of European alarm at the rising tide of migrants in his final years in power. He used it as a powerful wedge to improve his own standing. Back to 2004, Qaddafi began making deals with individual European states to control the tide of migrants. In August 2010, he visited his friend Silvio Berlusconi, then president of Italy, in Rome and said Europe would turn “black” without his help.

“Tomorrow Europe might no longer be European, and even black, as there are millions who want to come in,” Qaddafi said. “What will be the reaction of the white and Christian Europeans faced with this influx of starving and ignorant Africans … we don’t know if Europe will remain an advanced and united continent or if it will be destroyed, as happened with the barbarian invasions.”

Qaddafi had a handy solution. He offered to shut down his country and its coastal waters to the job seekers in exchange for €5 billion a year. He pointed to his work with Italy as proof he could get the job done. In June 2009, he signed a “friendship” agreement with Italy that involved joint naval patrols against migrants and Italy handing over migrants captured en route to Europe to Libya, no questions asked. The number of Africans caught trying to illegally enter Italy fell by more than 75 percent that year.

By the end of the year Qaddafi had struck a more modest €50 million deal. Internment camps were built and watchtowers erected on the beaches. There was little concern with how Qaddafi went about his business and there were frequent reports of rape and theft by Libyan security services.

When the uprising against Qaddafi began in early 2011, the situation only grew worse for the African migrants. Many rebel groups were convinced that any foreign African in the country were mercenaries for Qaddafi and hundreds were executed. I met a group of such so-called “mercenaries” – some shoeless, all poor and underfed and insisting they were only seeking jobs – held captive by rebels outside Benghazi that spring.

In the years since, Libya’s lawlessness has made traveling through the country even more dangerous and unpredictable. The videotaped mass execution of Ethiopian and Eritrean migrants carried out by the so-called Islamic State makes that clear enough. Yet still people go, and the UN refugee agency is now calling the recent shipwreck the deadliest it has ever recorded.

10 FACTS ABOUT

CORRUPTION IN NIGERIA

– July 14th 2021

10 Facts About Corruption in Nigeria
People most commonly define corruption as the “abuse of entrusted power for private gain,” and government officials and citizens feel its effects on an everyday basis. It is a growing political issue around the globe, but developing countries like Nigeria often struggle deeply to control or combat corruption. The most reliable source that measures corruption is the Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index. Nigeria often ranks in the bottom quartile of this index, with the scale being zero (most corrupt) to 100 (cleanest). Below are 10 facts about corruption in Nigeria.

10 Facts About Corruption in Nigeria

Nigeria has two main political parties: the All Progressive Congress party (ADC) and the People’s Democratic Party (PDP). These parties are almost identical in platforms but still oppose one another. Each party often increases corruption in Nigeria by utilizing misappropriated public funds to run opposing campaigns.
A survey from 2013 showed that over 75 percent of journalists admitted to accepting financial gifts from politicians. These bribes often lead to editors and journalists manipulating stories and coverage to create media corruption in Nigeria. Despite this, the country still maintains an almost completely free press.
Corruption in Nigeria has neither improved nor declined in score over the past several years. Typically, the country’s score varies from 25-28 any given year. Although there has not been a sharp increase or decrease, Nigeria still ranks below the average of 32 for the sub-Saharan African region.
Former petroleum minister Diezani Alison-Madueke used a $115 million bribe to secure an election victory for the PDP in 2015. The ADP and PDP collectively spent almost $2 billion on his campaign in the same year. This spending came from public funds and contributed to higher electoral corruption in Nigeria.
Entrepreneurs generate 50 percent of the GDP in Nigeria but often face extortion and racketeering from police forces. Federal legislators have diverted $433 billion to vague projects in the past several years. This hurts small businesses in the country and allows corruption in the government to continue.
Before the 2015 elections, the removal and distribution of $236 billion to 24 state governors occurred without explanation. Nigeria originally opened the fund to provide inexpensive loans to small businesses in the country. As of 2018, there is evidence to suggest that this money has been almost completely embezzled throughout the years.
Nigeria has conducted a fixed exchange rate for its currency, the naira, in hopes of preventing further inflation from corruption. The naira is currently one of the lower performing currencies in the world largely due to continuing corruption in Nigeria. This new rate has caused prices of imported goods to double and inflation to spike.
The Buhari administration has proposed a budget with plans for investing in agriculture and mining while battling corrupt business practices. However, projects like these often consume large quantities of public funds. This appropriation of funds to industrial projects often leads to higher levels of corruption in Nigeria.
Between 2011 and 2015, over $3.6 billion disappeared from Nigerian public coffers. Unfortunately, this stolen sum resulted in a loss of potential roads, schools and homes planned for construction. This includes a loss of 500 kilometers of potential roads and around 200 potential schools that required only one-third of the stolen funds.
Corruption in Nigeria affects poorer families most severely. These high levels of corruption could cost individuals $1,000 per person by 2030 if the country does not address it. Further, the levels of inequality continue to increase in the country due to corruption.

The country still has many steps to take in order to successfully defeat corruption and continue developing. A presidential advisory committee has recently established to combat corruption in Nigeria. Nigeria also now legally requires banks to issue universal identification numbers to individuals. This process works by tracking multiple accounts owned by an individual and identifies missing or misappropriated funds. Citizens must speak out against corruption and governments must be held accountable in order to fully combat the issue. Additionally, governments must strengthen their institutions and close loopholes that allow for corruption in Nigeria to continue. For now, Nigeria is taking action in hopes of at least decreasing corruption in the coming years.

– Hannah Easley

Violence and Abuse Wreak Havoc in Central African Republic – July 14th 2021

By Lisa Schlein

A human rights lawyer appointed by the United Nations Human Rights Council reported to the body Friday that the war-torn Central African Republic’s civilian population is being battered by both armed groups and security forces meant to protect them.

The Central African Republic has been in turmoil since rebels overthrew the government in 2013, displacing 1.2 million people. Togolese human rights lawyer Yao Agbetse was appointed by the U.N. council in 2019 to monitor and report on the human rights situation in the C.A.R.

He says the Coalition of Patriots for Change, a collection of major rebel groups, has intensified its attacks against the civilian population since March. He accuses the CPC of recruiting child soldiers, committing sexual violence and murders, illegal taxation, destruction and looting of property, and occupation of schools. He says action is being taken to hold them to account. He speaks through an interpreter

“Most of the leaders and members of the CPC are on the list of sanctions from the Security Council concerning the CAR,” Agbetse said. “The Security Council and the international community as a whole is taking the appropriate steps to ensure that these individuals can be held accountable to violations of human rights and international humanitarian law.”

What is happening in Tigray? Ethiopia’s brutal civil war explained – Posted July 14th 2021

In northern Ethiopia, millions have been displaced and thousands killed by government troops, and famine is looming

Ethiopia was, until last year, seen as one of Africa’s great recent success stories. From the mid-1990s, it started moving towards democracy, and from a state of dire poverty – in 2000, it was the world’s second poorest nation – became a model for rapid, effective development. In 2019, its prime minister, Abiy Ahmed, won the Nobel Peace Prize for ending Ethiopia’s 20-year war with neighbouring Eritrea.

But the nation’s underlying ethnic tensions and its violent history have proved hard to escape. Tigray, Ethiopia’s northernmost region, has often been a focal point for disputes. It is home to seven million people out of Ethiopia’s 112 million: Tigrayans are the nation’s third largest ethnic group (the two largest, the Oromo and the Amhara, make up more than 60%). They have a strong local Orthodox Christian identity, and a strong sense of grievance against central government.

Witnesses in Abi Addi, in the Temben region of Central Tigray, told The Telegraph that Ethiopian federal soldiers and Eritrean troops killed a total of 182 local people in a house-to-house massacre in the town and surrounding villages.

The paper reports that most of the victims were said to be farmers, whose bodies were then “dumped in a nearby crater” until their families and village elders “begged Ethiopian soldiers to allow burials to take place”.

One survivor who escaped into nearby mountains described seeing “dead bodies scattered, bodies half-eaten by dogs”, after returning to his village.

“The soldiers did not allow anyone to get close to the corpses,” 26-year-old Tesfay Gebremedhin continued. “But later, they started to feel disturbed by the terrible smell of the dead bodies. So they covered the bodies with dust.”

Humanitarian crisis

Ethiopian federal troops first moved into Tigray in November with the stated aim of “restoring the rule of law” by deposing the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), the regional ruling party.

vThe deployment followed attacks on army bases by fighters loyal to the TPLF, which has been feuding with the government of Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed since shortly after he came to power, in 2018.

On November 4, 2020, Ethiopia’s federal government launched what it called a “law enforcement operation” against “rogue” leaders of the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), the region’s ruling party, after TPLF fighters attacked a federal military base. TPLF leaders called the federal government’s response a war against the people of Tigray.

But tensions between the central government and TPLF have been smoldering since Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed’s appointment in April 2018 following a monthslong popular revolt.

He initiated a peace agreement with neighboring Eritrea and pushed for reforms such as opening trade, releasing political prisoners and unifying ethnic groups under his new Prosperity Party — measures that also sapped power from the long-dominant TPLF. Reforms that opened up political and economic space also have fueled inter-ethnic violence across the country, with more than 1.2 million people displaced by conflict in 2020 even before the Tigray crisis, the International Organization on Migration reports.Visit these sites for more about the Ethiopian refugee crisis:

The fighting in Tigray in its first month alone is believed to have claimed thousands of lives and displaced more than 1 million people. At least 50,000 have fled to neighboring Sudan, the U.N.’s refugee agency says. Ethiopia itself hosts more than 1 million refugees from other countries.

VOA journalists are reporting on the crisis for TV, radio and digital media. Covering the plight of refugees and displaced people around the world is one of VOA’s top priorities, as part of its mission to inform, engage and connect people in support of freedom and democracy.

ETHIOPIAN REFUGEES FLEE TO SUDAN

THE DIVISION OF ETHIOPIA’S MAJOR ETHNICITIES

The division of Ethiopia's major ethnic groups

^{(from 2007 Ethiopian census)}

South African Liberal Dream & Nightmare Reality – July 14th 2021

The death toll from rioting in South Africa rose to 72 on Tuesday, AFP reported, including 10 people trampled to death during looting at a mall, as police and the military fired stun grenades and rubber bullets to try to halt the unrest set off by the imprisonment last week of former President Jacob Zuma.

Hundreds have been arrested in the lawlessness that has raged in poor areas of two provinces, where a community radio station was ransacked and forced off the air Tuesday and some COVID-19 vaccination centers were closed, disrupting urgently needed inoculations.

Many of the deaths in Gauteng and KwaZulu-Natal provinces occurred in chaotic stampedes as thousands of people stole food, electric appliances, liquor and clothing from stores, officials said.

“We are confident our law enforcement agencies are able to do their job successfully. The current situation on the ground is under strong surveillance and we will ensure it will not deteriorate further,” the police minister Bheki Cele told reporters, saying the disturbances risked severe shortages of medicines and foodstuffs across South Africa.

Zuma jailed: Arrests as protests spread in South Africa – July 11th 2021

A burned car is seen at a road block during ongoing violent clashes in downtown Johannesburg, South Africa, 11 July 2021 — Burned out cars in downtown Joahnnesburg

Dozens of people have been arrested in South Africa as violence spreads following the jailing of former president Jacob Zuma.

Pro-Zuma protesters first took to the streets after the 79-year-old handed himself to authorities on Wednesday to begin a 15-month sentence.

But police now say criminals are taking advantage of the chaos, which spread from his home province of KwaZulu-Natal to Johannesburg, in Gauteng.

NatJOINTS, the national intelligence body, said some 300 people had barricaded a major highway in Johannesburg – South Africa’s economic hub.

About 800 people were also involved in an incident in which one police officer was shot in Alexandra, a township in Johannesburg. Two other officers were hurt.

Police also responded to reports of looting in both Johannesburg and KwaZulu-Natal. More than 60 people have been arrested so far.

It is unclear if they are linked to the pro-Zuma protests, with KwaZulu-Natal police spokesman Jay Naicker telling news agency Reuters officers had seen “criminals or opportunistic individuals trying to enrich themselves during this period”.

Researchers uncover Africans’ part in slavery

October 20, 1995
Web posted at: 8:25 p.m. EDT

Posted July 2nd 2021

From Correspondent Gary Strieker

CAPE COAST, Ghana (CNN) — For centuries along the West African coast, millions of Africans were sold into slavery and shipped across the Atlantic to the Americas.

The middlemen were European slave traders based in forts like Ghana’s Cape Coast Castle, now a tourist attraction and a somber reminder of a brutal crime against humanity.

That crime is usually blamed entirely on the European outsiders who inflicted slavery on African victims. But new research by some African scholars supports a different view – – that Africans should share the blame for slavery.

“It was the Africans themselves who were enslaving their fellow Africans, sending them to the coast to be shipped outside,” says researcher Akosua Perbi of the University of Ghana. (88K AIFF sound file or 88K WAV sound)

Based on her studies, Perbi says that European slave traders, almost without exception, did not themselves capture slaves. They bought them from other Africans, usually kings or chiefs or wealthy merchants.

The question is, why did Africans sell their own people?

For a thousand years before Europeans arrived in Africa, slaves were commonly sold and taken by caravans north across the Sahara.

“Slavery did exist in Africa,” says Irene Odotei of the University of Ghana.

In many African cultures, slavery was an accepted domestic practice, but it was slavery of a different kind. In Africa, the slave usually had rights, protection under law, and social mobility.

“Many house owners would call their slaves as their daughters or sons,” says Perbi. “They became part of the kin or family or lineage of the owners.” (100K AIFF sound file or 100K WAV sound)

The Atlantic slave trade grew at a time when many African states were at war with each other, taking prisoners that could easily be sold to traders in exchange for guns.

“It’s the gun which was a deciding factor in the slave trade — introduced by Europe,” says Odotei.

But while Africans may have sold their own people into slavery, researchers say the kings and chiefs had no idea of the brutality of slavery on the other side of the ocean. If they had, they say, maybe the slave trade across the Atlantic would never have grown so huge, or lasted for so many years.

Sharing the guilt for slavery may be disturbing and painful for Africans, but researchers say their objective is clear.

“They’re trying to uncover the facts so that people will take a lesson from the evil of the past and say ‘no more,'” says Kwame Arhin of the Institute of African Affairs.

And there is one thing they insist they are not doing.

“I’m not trying to shift blame or to make the Europeans feel less guilty,” explains Perbi.

For what many believe was the world’s greatest crime against humanity, there is more than enough guilt to share.

Related sites

African Wealth & Health – July 2nd 2021

Eswatini – Wikipedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swaziland

Eswatini , officially the Kingdom of Eswatini (Swazi: Umbuso weSwatini), sometimes written in English as eSwatini, and formerly and still commonly known in English as Swaziland (/ˈswɑːzilænd/ SWAH-zee-land; officially renamed in 2018), is a landlocked country in Southern Africa. It is bordered by Mozambique to its northeast and South Africa to its north, west, and south. At no more than 200 kilometres (12…

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Artifacts indicating human activity dating back to the early Stone Age, around 200,000 years ago, have been found in Eswatini. Prehistoric rock art paintings dating from as far back as c. 27,000 years ago, to as recent as the 19th century, can be found in various places around the country. Wikipedia · Text under CC-BY-SA license

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The Kingdom of Eswatini (Swaziland): Official Tourism Website

Welcome to Eswatini

Eswatini Regions Eswatini Experiences Events Calendar Despite being the smallest landlocked country in the Southern hemisphere, and the second smallest country in continental Africa, Eswatini, formerly known as Swaziland, more than makes up for its lack of size with …

Mrs Africa Globe lights up Marula Festival

Mrs Africa Globe lights up Marula Festival

Eswatini features on Acacia Africa’s family-friendly tours for the first time

Eswatini features on Acacia Africa’s family-friendly tours for the first time

Hike to Ngwempisi, Eswatini’s hidden corner with All Out Africa

Hike to Ngwempisi, Eswatini’s hidden corner with All Out Africa

Experience Eswatini with Big Game Parks’ 3 for 2 specials

Experience Eswatini with Big Game Parks’ 3 for 2 specials

Swaziland – Country Profile – Nations Online Project

A virtual guide to Swaziland, the small landlocked kingdom in southern Africa is bordered by South Africa and Mozambique. The country covers an area of 17,364 km², it is one of Africa’s smallest countries, slightly larger than half the size of Belgium, or slightly smaller than the U.S. state of New Jersey.

Fools Paradise June 3rd 2021

***A young Congolese gan***gster gives his views on women.

It requires more than money to sort out Africa. Post colonialism has seen worsening conditions. All black South Africa and Zimbabwe have seen extreme corruption and brutality, Still the do gooder white liberals preach.

The aid industry is riddled with parasites and corrupt officials while resources are squandered for the elites’ benefit and extravagant lifestyle and ‘respect.’ They don’t want whites lording it over them which is why they call any white men a threat in that way, They are labelled white supremacists before they start anything..

Young blacks don’t think beyond escaping into the white world of the west where they declaim against white supremacy because they want their share of an unsustainable lifestyle.

Their continent is riddled with war , along with dreadful consequences, , disease violent gang crime including rape and the west is getting that way. Meanwhile superficial idiots preach about the climate change and why we must follow lockdown rules when there is open door population movement for a whole lot of people who appear to have rights but not responsibilities. Our modern day Neros keep telling us that we must fight the far right , rather than face reality. That’s how we got two world wars. ***Robert Cook***

Africa has serious cultural issues. This block on criticism and comment in the name of equality and anti racism will simply exacerbate & export the problems. The ruling global elite are either stupid or see personal gain for their class in this attitude.
Patronising Tory Caroline Nokes wants it all to be seen as men oppressing women and whites oppressing blacks. We mustn’t see the class exploitation , profiteering and overpopulation issues. So many views are now criminalised by the elite consensus. Robert Cook

Led by the former Tory cabinet minister and chief whip Andrew Mitchell, who has been rallying against the cuts, the rebel MPs said they were “confident” of having the numbers to overturn the prime minister’s healthy Commons majority.

The amendment signed by 18 MPs — including 14 Conservatives — boasts other senior figures such as former cabinet ministers David Davis and Jeremy Hunt, alongside the chair of the international development committee, Sarah Champion.

It comes amid intense criticism of the government’s decision last year to flout the Conservative general election manifesto pledge and move to slash overseas aid spending from 0.7 per cent of national income to 0.5 per cent.

Ministers have insisted the cut — estimated to be around £4 billion — is only a temporary measure due to the economic fallout of the Covid pandemic, but have refused to test support in a Commons vote, or outline any timeframe for the budget to be restored.

The risk of an embarrassing defeat for the government over its decision to cut aid for some of the poorest and unstable areas of the globe could come just days before the prime minister hosts leaders from the G7 nations, including US president Joe Biden.

Mr Mitchell has tabled an amendment to the Advanced Research and Invention Agency (Aria) Bill, a piece of legislation which establishes a new “high-risk, high-reward” research agency backed with £800 million of taxpayers’ cash to explore new ideas.

The explanatory note of the amendment says: “This new clause is intended to reaffirm the duty in the International Development (Official Development Assistance Target) Act 2015 for UK official development assistance (ODA) to amount to 0.7 per cent of gross national income each year. It will require Aria to make up any shortfall in that proportion from January 2022”.

It will be up to speaker Sir Lindsay Hoyle to decide whether the amendment is selected for consideration when the Bill returns to the Commons for further consideration on 7 June.

Tobias Ellwood — the Conservative chair of the Commons Defence Committee who has signed the amendment — described the government’s cut as “devastating” on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme.

Asked about the size of the rebellion, he said: “We need the number 45 [to defeat gov] and at the moment I’m confident – quietly, cautiously confident – that we’re going to get that number”. So I do hope the government will recognise where we want to go and why we want to do this.”

“Next week at the G7 summit, members will address the simple question: is our world becoming more dangerous, or less?” he said.

“With growing authoritarianism, extremism extending beyond the Middle East, climate change creating a raft of new challenges, and of course so many countries holding out for help to tackle the pandemic, I think the answer is pretty clear indeed”.

He added: “And yet here were are holding this summit to address these very issues, but choosing to cut the aid budget — the one G7 nation to do so. As a leading western nation would must remain an exemplar in helping shape the world around us. Retaining that aid budget is absolutely in the spirit of Global Britain.”

Opposition parties, including Labour and the Liberal Democrats, have severely criticised the cut in funding for overseas aid and are almost certain to back the amendment, if it is selected next week.

Lisa Nandy, the shadow foreign secretary, told The Independent: “As the eyes of the world turn to Britain ahead of next week’s G7 Summit in Cornwall, the government faces defeat over its short-sighted and self-defeating decision to cut foreign aid. At the very moment our international partners are stepping up to lead the global response to the pandemic, the Tories are in retreat.

“Parliament is ready to do the right thing and vote to reverse these ill-judged cuts – will the government do the same?”

Caroline Nokes — another former Tory minister backing the amendment — told ITV’s Peston programme: “It’s taken quite a lot of manoeuvring to find an opportunity to actually have a vote on this. I feel really strongly that we legislated for the 0.7 per cent commitment and the cuts are affecting women and girls.

“I am chair of the Women and Equalities Select Committee, the cuts of 85 per cent to family planning, the cuts to girls’ education – what we know from that is that if girls are not educated they won’t be empowered, they won’t be empowered if they are pregnant too early.

“Women will die because of these cuts to family planning so I have joined forces with colleagues to make sure we can have a vote on it and I will be voting to keep that 0.7 per cent.”

Comment The very last purpose foreign aid has ever served is defeat poverty, The comment from Caroline Nokes is typical of the white upper middle class feminists in politics. They are fixated with the concept of female empowerment as the solution to the all the world’s problems.

History is being re written. The West’s white working class slaves are far less valuable. They are not allowed a racial identity. To claim one is to be racists against balcks. All blacks are seen as victims . They are portrayed as equally downtrodden. The left wing liberal view is that the nice black people were living in harmony with each other and nature, when the nasty white people arrived to take them away to the Americas for work as slaves..

The reality was very different . Black dynasties grew richer and more powerful off the sale of fellow blacks. The liberals and BLM don’t want to talk about this.

The problem is that the British and other European imperialists left behind ruthless dictators who shared exploitation of vast resources with big business interests. Their black masses were left to religion and to poverty, consequent overpopulation encouraged by religious delusion and hopes for a wonderful afterlife.

The only afterlife young black Africans can hope for is escape to the western industrial world. Some fans of foreign aid see cutting it as making the flow of migrants and so called asylum seekers greater. The European elite condemn all arguments against them. The aid industry is headed up by people on six figure salaries. The aid industry is not about progressing the poor. It is about guaranteeing the profits of global elites and their corporations.

We will hear some impressive moralising from Britain’s political elite in the House of Commons today. They will say fine words and virtue signal, with no mention of the ugly truth. Tribal hierarchies and in fighting opened the door to the slave trade. It is very much the same today.

Talking about the past is a very clever diversion for the ignorant black masses to rise up against and ultimately for poor whites to rebel against.. The elite do not care. The symbolic removal of slave statues is cover for the new and ongoing slavery. This argument about a tiny cut in foreign aid is more diversion.

Foreign aid is like urinating money into a bucket with a hole in the bottom , connected to a pipe leading to the rich dictator’s home. Senegal recently bought their leader a new state of the art Airbus because the old one had been left idle and wouldn’t work. That is a metaphor for African leaders. Robert Cook

Meet PM Reigns, Ghana plus size dancer who airline prevent from travelling sake of her size May 28th 2021

Ghanaian plus size dancer, Precious Mensah dey call for reforms which go make de life of plus size people comfortable.

Popularly known as PM Reigns, de Di Asa dance competition winner reveal how society dey make provision for just slim people while neglecting plus size people.

She recount give BBC Pidgin Favour Nunoo how in 2019 she no fit travel to Dubai sake of her size.

“I be that type who dey like travel den experience de world, but unfortunately my first travel experience no happen sake of my size” Miss Mensah talk.

She add say “I pass through so many things… People go see you in town de say you be too fat, we fit get your brazier and pants or you dey sew dem?”

One time dem try kick am off public transport sake of dem try charge her fare for two people wey she disagree.

Miss Mensah talk about how plus size people dey like socialize den have fun but restaurants, cinemas den stuff no dey make provision for dem.

She call on event Organisers, restaurants, cinemas to make available free chairs wey no get arm so say plus size people fit patronize dem.

Africa is theirs – May 18th 2021

Gold has been discovered in this locality, leading to black rebels attacking their fellow blacks and killing them. Anglo -U.S interests dislike Russian involvement because they think Africa is theirs.

Ethiopia Chaos & Bloodshed Will Spread March 20th 2021

Inter-ethnic violence in Metekel predates a brutal three-month-old conflict further north that is pitting Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed against the former ruling party of Tigray.

Girma Getahun, a priest and an Internally Displaced Person (IDP), fleeing from violence in the Metekel zone in Western Ethiopia, stands holding a cross in a camp in Chagni, Ethiopia, on January 28, 2021. (AFP)

The bloodshed has intensified just as the military is trying to assert control over Tigray, highlighting how Abiy, the 2019 Nobel Peace Prize winner, does not have the luxury of addressing just one security crisis at a time.

In mid-November, 34 civilians were killed in Metekel when gunmen attacked a bus.

In late December, one day after Abiy visited the area, more than 200 people perished in a pre-dawn massacre, some burned alive as they slept.

And last month more than 80 died in a raid involving knives and arrows.

Even as analysts puzzle over who and what is driving the violence, there are fears it could soon escalate.

Abiy’s government has unveiled plans to form a militia of civilians displaced by past attacks to return to Metekel to “protect” those remaining.

At a displacement camp in the town of Chagni, east of Metekel, Girmay is one of many residents who back this move.

“I don’t fully support the idea of forming a militia, because in my opinion it’s like saying, ‘Kill one another,'” Girmay told AFP as he clutched a wooden cross.

“But if there are no other options and if (the gunmen) are not disarmed, we shall train some recruits from here to protect our lives.”

On the night before Orthodox Christmas last month, Ethiopian priest Girmay Getahun donned a white robe and, Bible in hand, walked down the dirt road to his church to prepare for services.

Around midnight, heavily-armed fighters arrived in his village, in Ethiopia’s western Benishangul-Gumuz region, sending Girmay fleeing into the forest to hide for two days.

He returned to a horrifying sight: the corpses of his eight housemates, all day-labourers on teff and peanut farms, who had become the latest victims in a gruesome, perplexing string of attacks.

Hundreds have died and tens of thousands have fled their homes.

Inter-ethnic violence in this lowland area, known as Metekel, predates a brutal three-month-old conflict farther north that has pitted Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed against the former ruling party of the Tigray region.

Comment A small black elite makes a fortune from their dictatorships, in cahoots with western billionaires and muti national corporations. White working classes take the blame for the black and white elite who worked together trading slaves. These whites feel the pressure of the inevitable black and Muslim population into their countries and neighbourhoods , with elite slogans telling them about a wonderful multiculture that will never bother that elite. It’s a neat trick, but the media and police serve them. R.J Cook

LGBT+ History Month: Eudy Simelane – the international footballer murdered for being gay

By Keely WatsonBBC Sport

Last updated on

12 February 202112 February 2021.From the section Football

Eudy Simelane's mother Mally (left) and father Khotso (right) sit on the bridge built in honour of their murdered daughter next to a mural of her face on the wall — Eudy Simelane’s parents sit on the bridge bearing her image that was built in her memory

Warning: This article includes references to sexual assault and violent crime.

An international footballer, coach and aspiring referee, Eudy Simelane dedicated her life to the sport.

She was one of the first openly gay women to live in her township of Kwa-Thema in South Africa and was a well-known LGBT+ activist.

But because of her sexuality, Simelane was brutally raped and murdered in 2008, aged just 31.

This is the story of her life and how the legacy of her death is still impacting South African society.

‘She was a diamond’

Simelane was born on 11 March 1977, in Kwa-Thema, a township in the Gauteng province, south east of Johannesburg.

Her interest in football started when she was only four years old, demanding her brother Bafana always took her to practice with him despite it not being a sport commonly played by women at the time.

Passion soon became dedication as she honed her skills daily.

“Five o’clock in the morning, she [would be] at the gym – football was her favourite and her priority”, her late mother Mally recalled at a memorial lecture in 2016.

Nicknamed ‘Styles’ because she was left-footed, midfielder Simelane joined her local team, Kwa-Thema Ladies, now known as the Springs Home Sweepers.

Speaking to the BBC World Service in 2018 about Simelane’s popularity on the pitch, her father Khotso said: “Everyone came to the ground when she played, number six”.

Springs Home Sweepers has produced a number of stars including Janine van Wyk, South Africa’s most capped footballer and captain of the national team, known as ‘Banyana Banyana’, meaning ‘the girls’.

Simelane played several times for the national side, coached four local youth teams and wanted to qualify to become her country’s first female referee.

A campaigner for equality rights and social change, she was one of the first women to come out as a lesbian in South Africa

In the 2020 Eudy Simelane Memorial Lecture

, her brother, Bafana said: “In sport she was a diamond, scoring beautiful goals. She was a marvellous person, intelligent, everything. It was a package. Everything you would find in Eudy. Jokingly she was playing, teasing others. That is what I miss about her.”

On 27 April 2008, Simelane’s body was found in a stream just a few hundred metres from her home in Kwa-Thema.

Reports stated she was approached after leaving a pub, raped and then stabbed repeatedly.

Despite her death shocking many, activists claimed many lesbians in South Africa were targeted for ‘corrective rape’, a crime where the perpetrator aims to ‘cure’ the victim of their sexuality, converting them to heterosexuality.

Thato Mphuthi

pleaded guilty to the rape and murder of Simelane in February 2009 and was sentenced to 32 years in prison. The following September, Themba Mvubu was also found guilty of the crimes and was sentenced to life in prison. When questioned by reporters in court, he responded: “I’m not sorry.”

‘It opened the eyes of many’

Mally Simelane — Eudy Simelane’s mother Mally fought to change perceptions of LGBT+ people before her death in 2019

Simelane’s sexuality put her in a vulnerable position, something her mother recognised, telling the BBC, “the whole of South Africa knew Eudy was a lesbian”.

The unfortunate reality is Simelane’s story isn’t unique – she is one of many victims of similar, horrific crimes in South Africa.

A year prior to her death, Sizakele Sigasa

, a women’s and gay rights activist, and her friend Salone Massooa, were heckled outside a bar and called ‘tomboys’. The women were then gang raped, tortured, and shot dead.

Just a few years after Simelane’s murder, Noxolo Nogwaza, a 24-year-old lesbian, was found beaten and stoned to death in the same township Simelane lived.

However, as a country, South Africa was at the forefront of same-sex rights and became the first African nation to decriminalise same-sex acts in 1998.

The country also legalised same-sex marriage in 2006, seven years before the act was passed in the UK, and two years prior to Simelane’s tragic death.

Despite this, the country still has the highest number of recorded rape cases per capita

. Within this, it’s young, black, lesbian women that often fall victim to violent ‘corrective rape’ crimes in South African townships.

According to data released in 2017,

49% of black members of LGBT+ communities in the country are likely to know someone who has been murdered for being LGBT+, compared to 26% of white community members.

More often than not, the perpetrators of these awful attacks are not prosecuted for their actions.

Human rights activists and supporters of Eudy Simelane in August 2009 outside the Delmas court in Mpumalanga, before the trial

Simelane’s case has been an exception though. Her profile and story captivated the nation and brought the issue of ‘corrective rape’ to attention.

Following Simelane’s death, her mother Mally was instrumental in the fight to change her communities’ views on homosexuality, using her Methodist faith as a platform. She united with her local Pastor, Smadz Matsepe, in a fight to change attitudes towards LGBT+ individuals in society. Mally was fully committed to fighting prejudice until her passing in 2019.

“It opened the eyes of many and it challenged us to deal with the LGBT+ issue,” Matsepe told the BBC.

A bridge was built over the stream in Kwa-Thema, next to the football field where Simelane’s body was found. The bridge features her face imprinted on it and was built “as a reminder of the freedom, dignity and equality for all”, according to the Lesbian and Gay Equality Project in The Times.Another initiative set up with the aim of changing social attitudes, was The Eudy Simelane Memorial Lecture. This annual lecture, in partnership between the Ujamaa Centre at The University of KwaZulu-Natal, The Other Foundation, Pietermaritzburg Gay & Lesbian Network

, the KwaZulu Natal Christian Council, and Simelane’s family, aims to change attitudes towards LGBT+ people, particularly within some religious communities.

These bodies recognised that for there to be a significant social change, religious communities needed to adopt a new outlook on same-sex relationships and marriage, so that individuals could not try to use religious grounds to justify violence against LGBT+ people.

Professor Charlene van der Walt from the University of KwaZulu-Natal and Deputy Director of Ujamaa Centre told the BBC this year: “Eudy’s story is an example of what happens to a lot of families and a lot of faith communities, yet the issue of LGBT+ people in faith is often denied or invisible.”

The lecture is also an opportunity to stimulate conversations around LGBT+ communities.

Van der Walt added it was especially important to continue these conversation during the Covid-19 pandemic where LGBT+ people are “vulnerable” because they often are “in a family setting that doesn’t accept” their sexuality.

“We have made a massive leap in the right direction,” she said.

In the 2020 lecture, Simelane’s brother Bafana, said: “History repeats itself, so now, this lecture is eye opening to the community and other families that they must not take it as a curse if someone is gay, lesbian or transgender”.

Despite the tragic death of Simelane, it sent an important message across South Africa and was a catalyst for these projects and conversations to take place.

LGBT+ History Month: Eudy Simelane – the international footballer murdered for being gay Posted February 12th 2021

By Keely WatsonBBC Sport

Last updated on

12 February 202112 February 2021.From the section Football

Warning: This article includes references to sexual assault and violent crime.

An international footballer, coach and aspiring referee, Eudy Simelane dedicated her life to the sport.

She was one of the first openly gay women to live in her township of Kwa-Thema in South Africa and was a well-known LGBT+ activist.

But because of her sexuality, Simelane was brutally raped and murdered in 2008, aged just 31.

This is the story of her life and how the legacy of her death is still impacting South African society.

‘She was a diamond’

Simelane was born on 11 March 1977, in Kwa-Thema, a township in the Gauteng province, south east of Johannesburg.

Her interest in football started when she was only four years old, demanding her brother Bafana always took her to practice with him despite it not being a sport commonly played by women at the time.

Passion soon became dedication as she honed her skills daily.

“Five o’clock in the morning, she [would be] at the gym – football was her favourite and her priority”, her late mother Mally recalled at a memorial lecture in 2016.

Nicknamed ‘Styles’ because she was left-footed, midfielder Simelane joined her local team, Kwa-Thema Ladies, now known as the Springs Home Sweepers.

Speaking to the BBC World Service in 2018 about Simelane’s popularity on the pitch, her father Khotso said: “Everyone came to the ground when she played, number six”.

Simelane played several times for the national side, coached four local youth teams and wanted to qualify to become her country’s first female referee.

A campaigner for equality rights and social change, she was one of the first women to come out as a lesbian in South Africa

In the 2020 Eudy Simelane Memorial Lecture

On 27 April 2008, Simelane’s body was found in a stream just a few hundred metres from her home in Kwa-Thema.

Reports stated she was approached after leaving a pub, raped and then stabbed repeatedly.

Thato Mphuthi

‘It opened the eyes of many’

Simelane’s sexuality put her in a vulnerable position, something her mother recognised, telling the BBC, “the whole of South Africa knew Eudy was a lesbian”.

The unfortunate reality is Simelane’s story isn’t unique – she is one of many victims of similar, horrific crimes in South Africa.

A year prior to her death, Sizakele Sigasa

, a women’s and gay rights activist, and her friend Salone Massooa, were heckled outside a bar and called ‘tomboys’. The women were then gang raped, tortured, and shot dead.

Just a few years after Simelane’s murder, Noxolo Nogwaza, a 24-year-old lesbian, was found beaten and stoned to death in the same township Simelane lived.

However, as a country, South Africa was at the forefront of same-sex rights and became the first African nation to decriminalise same-sex acts in 1998.

The country also legalised same-sex marriage in 2006, seven years before the act was passed in the UK, and two years prior to Simelane’s tragic death.

Despite this, the country still has the highest number of recorded rape cases per capita

. Within this, it’s young, black, lesbian women that often fall victim to violent ‘corrective rape’ crimes in South African townships.

According to data released in 2017,

49% of black members of LGBT+ communities in the country are likely to know someone who has been murdered for being LGBT+, compared to 26% of white community members.

More often than not, the perpetrators of these awful attacks are not prosecuted for their actions.

Simelane’s case has been an exception though. Her profile and story captivated the nation and brought the issue of ‘corrective rape’ to attention.

“It opened the eyes of many and it challenged us to deal with the LGBT+ issue,” Matsepe told the BBC.

, the KwaZulu Natal Christian Council, and Simelane’s family, aims to change attitudes towards LGBT+ people, particularly within some religious communities.

The lecture is also an opportunity to stimulate conversations around LGBT+ communities.

“We have made a massive leap in the right direction,” she said.

Despite the tragic death of Simelane, it sent an important message across South Africa and was a catalyst for these projects and conversations to take place.

If you’ve been affected by issues raised in this article, there is information and support available on BBC Action Line.

vIf you’ve been affected by issues raised in this article, there is information and support available on BBC Action Line.

West African Elites’ Spending on UK Schools and Universities: A Closer Look

Matthew T. Page

January 28, 2021
Paper

Source: GettySummary: Many West African political elites send their children to boarding schools and universities abroad, especially in the UK. Yet some appear to be using unexplained wealth to pay for it, creating thorny anticorruption challenges for educators, policymakers, and law enforcement.Related Media and Tools

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Summary

Political, business, and cultural elites from around the world have a strong affinity for the United Kingdom (UK) education system. Nowhere is this truer than in West Africa, where some families in Nigeria and Ghana have a long tradition of sending their children to private boarding schools and universities in the UK. These institutions are especially popular destinations for the offspring of prominent politically exposed persons (PEPs) from the region. Immigration officials, admissions staff, and UK law enforcement are not likely to scrutinize the conditions under which the children of PEPs enroll in British schools, even though the PEPs themselves may have modest legitimate earnings and opaque asset profiles that in other circumstances would raise serious financial concerns. This relative lack of review has allowed some West African PEPs to channel unexplained wealth into the UK education sector.

It is not easy to estimate the overall value of this flow, yet it likely exceeds £30 million annually.¹ Most of these funds emanate from Nigeria and, to a lesser extent, Ghana; compared with these two countries, only a handful of students from elsewhere in West Africa seek an education in British schools. Tackling this small but significant illicit financial flow should be a priority for UK policymakers. In doing so, they would be helping to realize the UK’s global anticorruption objectives, advance its International Education Strategy, and close a troublesome anti–money laundering (AML) loophole. Failing to do so would exacerbate existing corruption challenges both at home and abroad and increase the UK education sector’s reputational liabilities.

Matthew T. Page

Matthew T. Page is a nonresident scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

Key Findings

Scores of West African PEPs’ children attend—or have recently graduated from—UK private boarding schools and universities. These include some that had been convicted of corruption-related crimes or had their assets seized by British courts. Among Nigerian political elites in particular, demand for places at UK private boarding schools and universities will remain high, exacerbating corruption risks to the country’s education sector.
The overwhelming majority of West African students in the United Kingdom pose little or no corruption risk; their families do not possess unexplained wealth and they are not linked to PEPs. However, many West African PEPs appear to be using unexplained wealth to pay for UK school and university fees. Stagnating salaries, rapidly increasing tuition and living costs, and declining currency values have made it increasingly difficult for some senior government officials to legitimately afford the cost of a UK education. Financial flows involving students linked to these officials may require closer scrutiny.
British schools and universities’ increasing awareness of money laundering risks is necessary—but not sufficient—to forestall illicit financial flows through the UK education sector. Many institutions still appear reluctant to acknowledge outside criticism of the sector’s anticorruption shortcomings or learn from recent scandals. Some have strengthened their anticorruption protocols, but many are still reluctant to report suspicious transactions.
The British government policies and programs created to boost the country’s international education sector lack a much-needed anticorruption component. Including modest anticorruption safeguards into the UK’s International Education Strategy would help government and education sector stakeholders to better tailor their marketing approaches to high-risk jurisdictions like Nigeria. Over the long term, these safeguards would reduce the sector’s vulnerability to illicit financial flows.
Educational institutions in Canada, the United States, and other countries that recruit elite students from West Africa are exposing themselves to the same corruption risks as their British counterparts. Although the UK education sector continues to attract West African PEPs, illicit financial flows from the region to boarding schools and universities in other Anglophone countries likely will increase over the coming decade, posing new anticorruption challenges for their policymakers.

Policy Implications and Recommendations

The UK education sector’s vulnerability to illicit financial flows generated by PEPs—both in West Africa and beyond—merits greater attention from policymakers, school and university leaders, education service providers, and law enforcement. Any effort by British policymakers to expand international education exports needs to be reconciled with other national strategic objectives, like combating global illicit financial flows. Otherwise, the recruitment of more wealthy students from corruption-prone, highly impoverished countries like Nigeria could handicap these countries’ socioeconomic development by enabling capital flight, amplifying foreign exchange and currency pressures, and reinforcing domestic educational disparities.
Any corrective policy changes must address these challenges holistically and should not be unreasonably burdensome to education sector stakeholders or international students. They should be structured to advance the United Kingdom’s strategic anticorruption interests by reducing illicit financial flows into the education sector without diminishing its international education export capacity. To do so, UK policymakers should take steps to clarify the education sector’s AML responsibilities, strengthen the anticorruption capacity of immigration officials and other gatekeepers, and provide anticorruption training and advice to key education sector stakeholders.
For their part, the United Kingdom’s independent schools, universities, and their intermediaries also have an important role and a clear interest in protecting the education sector from illicit financial flows. To start, they should strengthen internal policies and procedures designed to identify and respond to potential corruption risks. At the same time, education sector professional bodies should embrace calls for reform rather than reflexively bristle at constructive criticism from government, the media, or anticorruption advocates.

Introduction

A high-quality education in the United Kingdom is an expensive purchase desired by many but unaffordable for most. For numerous West African elites, it is also a family tradition and a sought-after means of reinforcing their family’s preeminent social, political, and economic status from one generation to the next. For the region’s top business elites, the cost of private boarding school—now upward of £35,000 per year—is easily affordable given their world-class earnings. It is less clear, however, how West African political elites—or politically exposed persons (PEPs)—can afford to send their children to schools or universities in the United Kingdom given their far more modest salaries. Yet many continue to do so, no questions asked.²

The gap between what West African PEPs pay for a UK education and what they can legitimately afford is a significant red flag. It suggests that the tuition fee payments they make to UK institutions may include proceeds of crime and thus constitute an illicit financial flow. Another concerning indicator is reports of recent instances in which UK educational institutions admitted the children of West African PEPs convicted of corruption or subject to corruption-related asset seizures. It is not easy to estimate the overall value of this flow, but it likely exceeds £30 million annually. Most of these funds emanate from Nigeria and Ghana; few students from other West African countries study in the United Kingdom.

This paper assesses the character, causes, and consequences of illicit financial flows into the UK education sector via West African PEPs. It first examines the scope and scale of international student recruitment from West Africa and then focuses on the small but significant minority of PEP-linked students who may pose a corruption risk to the sector. It then looks at the reasons why West African PEPs are especially attracted to British schools and universities, evaluates the adequacy of current anticorruption safeguards protecting the sector, and finally recommends ways to strengthen them.

Putting a Regional Problem Into Global Context

Recent media reports have illustrated the degree to which the UK education sector is vulnerable to corruption from illicit international financial flows. A 2019 article, for example, outlined how in one banking scandal known as the Troika Laundromat, a now defunct Lithuanian bank served as a conduit for hundreds of suspicious payments worth £4.2 million by anonymous shell companies to UK educational institutions, including the prestigious Charterhouse School.³ A 2014 report likewise revealed Moldovan police claims that companies linked to an alleged £14 billion money laundering scheme transferred funds to bank accounts belonging to a top UK private school.⁴ Transparency International’s 2019 report “At Your Service” shed light on the UK education sector’s corruption vulnerabilities through its analysis of how some UK professionals—including banks, law firms, and company service providers—help corrupt individuals and regimes launder their money and reputations.⁵ Out of the 400 major corruption schemes analyzed in the report, 177 involved significant expenditures for schools and universities.⁶ The report also noted that because these institutions are not subject to the same anti–money laundering (AML) rules as other professional organizations in the United Kingdom, they are especially vulnerable to kleptocrats and criminals seeking to spend unexplained wealth.⁷

For its part, UK law enforcement has criticized the education sector’s failure to proactively identify and report suspicious financial transactions. In 2018, then-minister for security and economic crime Ben Wallace warned that private schools in particular were being used to launder dirty money, warning that UK authorities would “come down on” schools “who don’t ask many questions if suspicious people come along with cash.”⁸ The National Crime Agency (NCA), the United Kingdom’s lead law enforcement agency focusing on organized crime, similarly noted that “if the salary of a parent is so low [that] they could not possibly afford the fees legitimately, this should also set alarm bells ringing.”⁹

The UK education sector’s reaction to these comments has been mixed. Some groups have heeded calls for reform, but others have bristled at such outside criticism. Two professional bodies—the Independent Schools Council and the Independent Schools’ Bursars Association—encouraged their member schools to tighten AML safeguards and file suspicious activity reports (SARs) as appropriate.¹⁰However, another body—the Headmasters and Headmistresses’ Conference (HMC)—pushed back on government concerns, stating that “there is no evidence we are aware of that any school has ever knowingly taken illicit payments and it is entirely wrong for anyone to suggest so,” that “schools exist to educate children and we are not experts in detecting signs of international crime,” and that “every school now has an updated procedure to help them check the provenance of funds.”¹¹ Such uneven responses indicate the UK education sector’s internal tensions over its connections with potentially illegal financial flows.

Despite these assertions and promised reforms, UK educational institutions still rarely flag suspicious transactions. Out of roughly 480,000 SARs submitted to the NCA in the 2018/2019 fiscal year, UK schools and universities submitted just twenty-four—a miniscule number and fewer than the previous year. Likewise, examples of clear AML failures are not far from the headlines. In July 2020, for example, the NCA seized over £1 million from one such individual: a convicted Nigerian fraudster living in the United Kingdom. In addition to living a lavish lifestyle well beyond his legitimate income, his three children attended private schools with annual fees of £37,000 per child.¹² This apparent gap between promised reforms and real-world outcomes suggests that the UK education sector could do more to protect itself from illicit cash flowing into it from West Africa and beyond.

Methodology Note

This paper examines a complex and contentious issue. Given the privacy and reputational concerns, all individual or institutional identities have been anonymized, except in cases where those identities already have been widely reported in the media. Apart from interviews, this paper cites only publicly available, nonprivileged information. It is informed by thirty-one semistructured interviews conducted by the author and a Nigeria-based researcher with recent West African alumni of UK independent schools and universities, as well as UK and Nigeria-based international education experts. The author and researcher ensured a gender balance among interviewees. The paper also draws on insights gleaned from Dr. Pere Ayling’s interviews (conducted between 2012 and 2014) with twenty Nigerian elite parents whose children attended UK boarding schools.¹³

This paper also incorporates material from West African journalists who cover political corruption issues. However, these journalists viewed this topic as especially sensitive and therefore were reticent to speak about it candidly. This reticence reflects the journalists’ concerns that revealing embarrassing information about senior officials might jeopardize their career prospects or personal safety.

West African Elites’ in UK Schools and Universities: Scope, Scale, and Trends

West African students are a modest but growing share of the British international education market—a sector that UK policymakers hope to expand post-Brexit. As of 2016, the export value of UK universities was £13.4 billion.¹⁴ Independent primary and secondary schools collectively brought in £930 million from overseas students—a 48 percent increase over 2010. The UK government’s 2019 International Education Strategy aims to increase that contribution further by increasing international student numbers by 30 percent and upping the sector’s value to £35 billion by 2030.¹⁵

The strategy specifically mentions Nigeria as a UK education market opportunity, noting that “the demand for skills across Africa is significant and we must ensure that UK providers are in the best position to play a competitive role in meeting that demand.”¹⁶ Neighboring Ghana is also widely seen as a secondary market with strong growth potential. Yet the flow of students from both countries—which greatly exceed the combined total from the rest of West Africa—can vary significantly year-to-year depending on macroeconomic trends, monetary policies, the ease and speed of visa application processes, and the availability of post-study residency permits.

Nigeria: A Complex and Dynamic International Education Market

Nigeria’s international education market defies simple characterization. It is, according to one expert, “a market of extremes, it is either very tough, or buoyant.”¹⁷ In recent years, Nigerian elites’ high demand for a UK education has been dampened by a prolonged economic downturn, domestic political changes, growing obstacles to making school fee payments, and worsening exchange rates.¹⁸ Overall, Nigerian students’ enrollment in UK schools and universities closely correlates with the country’s gross domestic product (GDP) growth.

The impact of Nigeria’s 2014–2016 recession on many elite families, compounded by government restrictions on the amount of foreign exchange made available to the public, led to a sharp decline in Nigerian students attending UK schools and universities (see table 1).¹⁹ Unable to freely convert their naira savings into pounds, many Nigerian parents struggled to pay their children’s UK school fees in full and on time.²⁰ Faced with payments deadlines, some families were forced to buy pounds on the black market at a 40 percent premium.²¹ Some very wealthy families—including those who held dollar- or sterling-denominated assets in overseas bank accounts or enjoyed privileged access to discounted foreign exchange via bureaux de change operated by friends or family members—were less impacted by these restrictions.

As Nigeria emerged from recession in early 2017, its central bank relaxed its controls on sales of foreign exchange, making it easier and more affordable for parents of children schooling abroad to pay tuition fees.²² As economic conditions eased, the market steadily improved until early 2020, when the global coronavirus pandemic disrupted several steps in the admissions process. Nevertheless, a combination of fee increases and worsening exchange rates meant that for many Nigerian families, the cost of attending a private boarding school in the United Kingdom had effectively doubled between 2015 and 2020. As Nigeria’s economic growth is expected to plateau over the next five years, owing to issues such as long-standing economic mismanagement, high unemployment, and stagnating global demand for crude oil, it is likely that a UK education will fall further out of reach for most middle-class Nigerians. At that point, only the country’s super-wealthy business and political elites will be able to afford it.

Independent schools

British independent schools—especially private boarding schools—view Nigeria as an increasingly attractive market. Most UK independent schools warmly welcome Nigerian students, according to market experts. They overwhelmingly see these students as better-than-average performers and “net contributors.”²³ The number of Nigerian students at UK independent schools peaked in 2015 and then decreased somewhat in response to worsening economic conditions in Nigeria (see table 2). It is, however, difficult to precisely estimate the number of Nigerian students at UK schools and universities. Many of these students—perhaps as many as 50 percent—are dual nationals, meaning that they are counted as domestic (UK) students in schools’ census returns, and so these figures likely do not reflect an accurate assessment.²⁴

Despite being “one of the most complicated, sensitive and potentially difficult [boarding recruitment markets] in the world,” Nigeria is also a lucrative one for overseas schools willing to invest time and attention in cultivating relationships with top Nigerian private “feeder schools.”²⁵ Some UK institutions have developed partnerships with such schools, leading to mutually beneficial curricular, staff, and sport exchanges.²⁶ Many of Nigeria’s premier private schools are located in Lagos, one of the world’s megacities and the country’s commercial capital. In recent years, however, the number of private schools in the capital city of Abuja has grown rapidly, and many of these schools cater to the children of Nigeria’s wealthy political elites.²⁷

Although independent schools in the United Kingdom continue to be popular with Nigeria’s elite families, others have turned to Canadian boarding schools as a viable alternative. According to one local agent, Nigerian families are attracted to Canadian schools because they are less expensive, send more pupils to U.S. Ivy League universities and the UK’s Oxford and Cambridge universities, and have more impressive facilities and extracurricular activities than their UK counterparts.²⁸ Canadian officials have also been more effective than their British counterparts at partnering with its education sector stakeholders to develop a more sophisticated regional-based marketing strategy keyed to helpful visa and immigration policy changes, according to one international education expert.²⁹ Consequently, UK independent schools have had to be competitive in their partnership and recruitment efforts in Nigeria and cannot rest on their reputations alone to attract potential pupils.

The disruptive effects of the global coronavirus pandemic on travel, education, and immigration also are likely to influence the Nigerian boarding school market in new and unpredictable ways, especially as high-end local providers scramble to meet pent-up domestic demand for sixth form/A-level programs (equivalent to the last two years of U.S. high school). Before the pandemic, most elite Nigerian private schools had not had such programs because their students normally transitioned directly to UK boarding schools or sixth-form colleges.³⁰ Now, as Nigeria’s top private schools create high-quality sixth-form programs to meet this demand, it is likely that fewer Nigerian families—especially those belonging to the country’s rising middle class—will elect to send their children to UK boarding schools.³¹ A growing number of partnerships between top Nigerian private secondary schools and UK universities will compound this trend.³² Parents who feel more confident that their Nigerian-educated children will be competitive applicants to British universities may not consider it necessary to finance an expensive boarding school education in the United Kingdom first.

Universities

The Nigerian market is equally complex for UK universities, who also face increasing global competition for international applicants. Although the overall number of Nigerian students attending UK universities has decreased over the past several years (see table 3), Nigeria still ranks sixth in terms of non-EU enrollments, just behind Malaysia, Hong Kong, the United States, India, and China.³³ Traditionally, UK universities have prioritized recruiting postgraduate students from Nigeria, many of whom tap into Nigerian government-sponsored scholarship programs to complete a master’s degree or even start doctoral studies in the United Kingdom.³⁴

The decline in Nigerian enrollments cannot be attributed to any one factor. Nigeria’s recent recession, decline in Nigerian government scholarships, naira devaluation, increase in global market competition, repeated changes to UK visa and residency rules, and sharpening of antimigrant rhetoric in the UK have all had an impact on university applications.³⁵ The decrease may also be a sign that UK universities are no longer affordable for most middle-class Nigerian families. If so, the overall number of students wealthy Nigerian elite families could be holding steady—or even modestly increasing.

Broadly speaking, UK universities see Nigerian students—and indeed international students generally—as a revenue center. They typically pay more than three times the fees paid by students from the United Kingdom or from European Union countries. Some UK universities also offer discounts of 20 to 30 percent if students can afford to pay their fees in advance.³⁶ But unlike their U.S. and Canadian competitors, very few UK universities offer scholarships or discounts to Nigerian students.³⁷ Those that do—most notably Coventry University—typically attract more Nigerian applicants by combining their scholarships with effective marketing, tailored course offerings, and competitive fees.³⁸ Table 4 shows which UK universities attract the most Nigerian students and which are recruiting more or fewer than they were four years ago.

Table 4. Top 15 UK University Destinations for Nigerian Students
Institution	2018/19 Nigerian Students(%∆ vs 2014/15)	% of Institutions’ Total International Students
Coventry University	555 (↓ 49%)	4.63%
University of Hertfordshire	365 (↓ 34%)	8.02%
Robert Gordon University	340 (↓ 41%)	16.79%
University of Salford	270 (↓ 48%)	14.96%
Nottingham Trent University	225 (↓ 21%)	4.71%
University of Birmingham	215 (↓ 36%)	2.36%
Anglia Ruskin University	210 (↓ 36%)	5.93%
University of the West of England	210 (↓ 4%)	5.32%
University of Portsmouth	205 (↓ 40%)	4.58%
University of Northumbria	200 (↑ 54%)	4.88%
University of Aberdeen	195 (↓ 7%)	3.72%
University of Nottingham	190 (↓ 19%)	2.32%
De Montfort University	175 (↑ 25%)	3.31%
University of Leeds	175 (↓ 41%)	1.89%
University of Manchester	165 (↓ 47%)	1.14%
Source: UK Higher Education Statistics Agency, “Table 28—Non-UK HE Students by HE Provider and Country of Domicile: Academic Years 2014/15 to 2018/19,” accessed October 7, 2020, https://www.hesa.ac.uk/data-and-analysis/students/table-28.

Currently, the university recruitment market is more complex. UK institutions seek to recruit postgraduates along with traditional undergraduates and more recently with “pathway” students. Pathway programs—many of which are managed by for-profit companies like Kaplan, INTO, or Navitas—are expensive preparatory courses intended to prepare international students who may academically qualify for direct admission for delayed entry into UK universities.³⁹ An increasing number of universities have been outsourcing their international recruitment to such pathway companies, which guarantee their institutional partners a certain quota of well-trained students each year.⁴⁰ Such advanced entry programs—which can increase the cost of an undergraduate degree to over £80,000—have become a “big business,” according to one expert.⁴¹ Many Nigerian students have also attended university foundation courses in the United Kingdom or at top-tier private secondary schools in Nigeria. Unlike the pathway programs, these preparatory courses do not guarantee a university place to their graduates.⁴²

As with its boarding schools, Canada’s universities are gaining market share in Nigeria. Many Nigerian families are attracted to their more affordable tuition fees as well as the country’s less onerous visa process and clearer pathways to postgraduate work and residency.⁴³ In 2020, the Canadian government sought to make the country even more competitive by introducing the Nigeria Student Express scheme, aimed at improving student visa processing times and introducing a specialized system for verifying the financial status of prospective applicants.⁴⁴ Nigerian applicants also see Canada as a safer environment for people of color—one that is less xenophobic than the United States and the United Kingdom and thus a more attractive destination.⁴⁵ For these reasons, the number of Nigerian students attending Canadian institutions increased from 2,825 in 2009 to 11,985 in 2019.⁴⁶

Other Anglophone countries also compete against the United Kingdom for Nigerian university students. In 2018, roughly 13,400 Nigerian attended U.S. universities—the highest amount since the mid-1980s—contributing an estimated $514 million to the U.S. economy.⁴⁷ Likewise, Ireland and Australia are issuing more student visas to Nigerians each year.⁴⁸ Looking closer to home, a growing number of Nigerian elites—especially those who can no longer afford British institutions’ disproportionately high tuition fees—are sending their children to private universities in Nigeria or less-expensive Ghanaian universities.⁴⁹

Nigerian Government Scholarship Bodies: Enablers or Embezzlers?

The Nigerian government operates numerous university scholarship programs aimed primarily at postgraduates seeking to study in the United Kingdom and elsewhere internationally. However, these government entities—which include the Petroleum Technology Development Fund (PTDF), Niger Delta Development Commission (NDDC), Federal Scholarship Board (FSB), Tertiary Education Trust Fund, and numerous state government scholarship boards—are all highly vulnerable to corruption, making them precarious partners for the UK education sector.

The PTDF, which partners with eighteen British universities, has a particularly significant UK footprint.⁵⁰ It sends dozens of postgraduate students to study in its chosen institutions each year. According to a recent government audit, however, the PTDF spends far more on itself than on the scholarships it provides. Between 2012 and 2016—the period covered by the audit—the PTDF disbursed N29.6 billion (£61 million) in scholarships while spending N45.3 billion (£93.4 million) on its own staffing, administrative, training, and travel costs.⁵¹ The audit also cast doubt on the value of the scholarship program, noting that “of the numerous numbers of scholars funded by the [PTDF] . . . it is difficult to ascertain the proportion of successful scholars who returned after their study programmes and integrated into the Nigeria oil and gas industry.”⁵²

Overseen by political appointees and lacking in transparency, these bodies have been dogged by numerous corruption and mismanagement scandals. Since 2018, many students studying abroad on PTDF and NDDC scholarships have been left stranded overseas after their scholarships went unpaid.⁵³ In 2018, a Nigerian senate committee accused the FSB of large-scale fraud and threatened to investigate it.⁵⁴ A subsequent media inquiry revealed that the FSB was awarding scholarships to ineligible recipients, including some who were overage or underage or who did not take the mandatory exams.⁵⁵

Out of all of Nigeria’s national scholarship bodies, however, the NDDC is especially corruption prone. In April 2020, a Nigerian Senate investigation revealed that the NDDC disbursed a total of N85.6 million (£176,500, or £12,600 each) to fourteen top NDDC officials so they could attend the UK degree-granting ceremonies of several of the commissions’ scholarship recipients.⁵⁶ The NDDC made this disbursement—which as of July 2020 had yet to be repaid—even though both Nigeria and the United Kingdom were in lockdown and there were no commercial flights between the two countries. The Senate probe also revealed that many of the same officials had paid scholarships to themselves at a time when the NDDC had cut off payments to legitimate scholarship recipients already studying abroad.⁵⁷

Nigeria’s state scholarship bodies likewise are vulnerable to malfeasance and graft. In July 2020, Nigeria’s Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) arraigned the former head of the Lagos State Scholarship Board over an alleged N127 million (£262,000) fraud.⁵⁸ The EFCC also arraigned ex-officials of the Kwara State Scholarship Board in January 2020, charging them with allegedly embezzling N50 million (£103,000) in scholarship funds.⁵⁹

Looking beyond these headline-grabbing scandals, Nigeria’s scholarship bodies have also become more politicized and less objective since 2015, according to experts interviewed for this paper. According to one interviewee, “Scholarship bodies were following the rules” back in 2015, but “things have changed” and “the process has been tampered with . . . even if, on paper, it looks as though it is merit-based.”⁶⁰ This shift suggests that the Nigerian government is awarding an increasing proportion of its scholarships based on applicants’ political and personal ties rather than their academic prowess.⁶¹ At the same time, Nigerian government scholarship bodies also are becoming more commercialized, forging cozy relationships with service providers and universities which (along with Western governments) actively lobby for their business. Such lobbying could verge on corruption if the relationship were to involve inappropriate gifts, excessive hospitality, or other kickbacks to Nigerian government officials.⁶² Looking ahead, UK universities may be exposed to greater reputational risks—and even scrutiny from domestic and international law enforcement—in connection with their financial dealings with Nigerian government scholarship funds or Ghana’s scandal-prone equivalent.

Ghana: A Bonus Market of Bargain-Hunting Elites

British independent schools and universities see Ghana as a “bonus market” with significant growth potential.⁶³ They are seeking to tap into Ghana’s growing elite networks, attracting students from families that have prospered from the country’s newfound petroleum wealth and recent rapid economic growth. In a recent prediction (albeit now overshadowed by the coronavirus pandemic), the International Monetary Fund estimated that Ghana’s economy would grow by 8.8 percent, making it the world’s fastest-growing economy in 2019.⁶⁴ The growth in the number of Ghanaian students attending UK boarding schools have exceeded that pace, increasing 23 percent from 2018 to 2019.⁶⁵ Nevertheless, the overall number of visas issued to Ghanaians wishing to study in the United Kingdom has remained relatively steady over the past decade (see table 5).

Ghana’s international education market also has been buoyed by Ghanaian elites’ academic pedigrees. For many, sending their children to schools and universities in the United Kingdom is a family tradition. Ghana’s current president, Nana Akufo-Addo, for example, attended Lancing College—an independent school in West Sussex—and briefly attended Oxford University. Several elite private secondary schools in and around Ghana’s capital city of Accra, such as SOS-Hermann Gmeiner International College and Ghana International School, also attract children of wealthy industrialists and senior politicians.⁶⁶

Nevertheless, in contrast to Nigerian elites, Ghana’s wealthiest families demonstrate a somewhat weaker preference for UK schools and universities. Many elites send their children to the United States or Canada for higher education, often to take advantage of scholarships that their universities offer. British universities, in contrast, have rarely provided financial assistance to international students. The Ghana Educational Trust Fund (GETFund) also provides government scholarships for Ghanaian students undertaking university studies abroad, though recently the program has been dogged by scandal.⁶⁷ In February 2020, Ghana’s auditor-general found that GETFund scholarships were improperly awarded to dozens of adult PEPs and their associates for graduate-level study.⁶⁸

Because of Ghanaian elites’ bargain-seeker mentality, UK schools and universities face greater international competition for the country’s globally mobile students. According to one expert, “There is a cultural difference between Nigerian elites who see spending money as a status symbol and Ghanaian elites, who are more understated. Historically, they have wanted to play down their wealth . . . and fly under the radar. [In Ghana], even multimillionaires are looking for scholarships.”⁶⁹ Such cost considerations and a newly streamlined visa process appear to be driving Ghanaian students’ growing interest in Canadian schools. Ghanaian students attending Canadian institutions jumped from 545 in 2009 to 2,070 in 2019.⁷⁰ U.S. universities also see Ghana as a stable regional platform from which they can recruit regionally. At least two U.S. institutions—the private Webster University and the public Morgan State University—have established satellite campuses in Ghana. As these and other Western universities expand and develop their footprint and academic offerings in Ghana, they have become market disruptors that gradually dampen regional demand for costlier overseas institutions.

Comparative Case Study: Libyan Elites and UK Schools

Like Nigeria and Ghana, Libya is an African petro-state with a wealthy, globe-trotting elite and a thriving diaspora population. Yet it appears that comparatively few Libyan students choose to attend UK educational institutions or do so as dual nationals of another country. This impression was echoed by international education experts interviewed for this paper, one of whom stated, “I’ve never heard of them in my eighteen years in the sector.”⁷¹

The relative lack of Libyan students in UK primary, secondary, and higher education is notable considering that according to the most recent census (2011), 16,000 Libyan emigres—roughly 16 percent of Libya’s estimated global diaspora—live in the United Kingdom.⁷² Moreover, over the past several years, the number of UK visas issued to Libyan students dropped from 5,546 in 2010 to just 414 in 2017.⁷³ This decline may be due to instability in Libya since 2011, shifts within Libyan diaspora communities, or other factors.

West African PEPs’ School Fees: A Possible Illicit Financial Flow

Market trends, interviews, press reports, and social media all suggest that West African PEPs’ children make up a small but significant share of West African students attending UK schools and universities. Given the high cost of tuition relative to these PEPs’ legitimate income and explainable assets, these expenditures arguably represent an illicit financial flow into the United Kingdom.

That said, it is difficult to approximate the financial value of these flows. In 2018, the Nigerian government identified 130,000 high net worth individuals and companies who had underpaid taxes by using tactics that included charging nonallowable personal expenses—particularly overseas school fees—as business expenses.⁷⁴ Given that, in 2017, there were 12,030 Nigerian students studying in the United Kingdom (10,540 at universities and 1,490 at independent schools), it is plausible that a significant share of their fee payments involved such tax evasion.⁷⁵ If a British university or school accepted a payment tainted by tax evasion, it could be violating UK law under the Proceeds of Crime Act.⁷⁶

Predicate crimes other than tax evasion are also likely tainting funds used to pay the school fees of some West African PEPs. According to one political journalist interviewed for this paper:

A lot of politicians are only able to afford UK schools and housing with proceeds from corruption. . . . Most of the politicians we know were not rich before they joined politics. Most of them became rich after politics. Those who were rich before they joined politics became richer after they joined politics. [For example,] I had this neighbor in my area that was appointed a director [senior civil servant] in a ministry, and suddenly, he sent two of his children to private schools [and a U.S. university]. About a year down the line, something happened and there was a change in government. He was changed and someone else was assigned in that role. He could not afford them anymore, so he had to take one off from the school and eventually removed the second. That is a pointer that he must have been getting an extra largess of office, which were proceeds of corruption.⁷⁷

Such anecdotes should serve as a red flag for policymakers and law enforcement officials because they suggest a strong correlation between PEPs’ corruption opportunities and their spending on international education.

Tuition Fees Dwarf Official Salaries

Perhaps the most compelling red flag relating to West African PEPs’ payments to UK educational institutions is how greatly the payments exceed their official salaries. Even these countries’ senior-most government officials earn relatively modest salaries. In Ghana, for example, cabinet ministers’ annual salary amounts to just £2,200 annually, not including allowances.⁷⁸ A Nigerian cabinet minister takes home roughly £16,000 annually, consisting of a modest base salary plus several large allowances and gratuities (see table 6).⁷⁹

Senior Nigerian civil servants earn considerably less than top officeholders. Since April 2019, the country’s public service pay ceiling has been N6.2 million (£12,784).⁸⁰ Apart from a few top officials, however, most civil servants make significantly less than this amount. Many are also earning less in real terms than they were a decade ago owing to inflation, rising consumer prices, and the steady decline in the value of the naira. To illustrate, even though top civil servants earned less (N5.4 million) in 2010 than they did in 2020, that sum was worth more than twice as much in pound sterling at the start of the decade.⁸¹

Public officials’ earning potential is further constrained by a constitutional restriction that prohibits them from engaging in private business. Section 2(b) of the Code of Conduct for Public Officers of the Federal Republic of Nigeria states that “a public officer shall not . . . except where he is not employed on full time basis, engage or participate in the management or running of any private business, profession, or trade, but nothing in this sub-paragraph shall prevent a public officer from engaging in farming.”⁸² As such, many public servants lack alternative sources of legitimate income beyond their spouse’s earnings.

So how do so many Nigerian government officials become inexplicably wealthy over their tenure? They appear to use a wide range of self-enrichment tactics that include misappropriating public property, engaging in various forms of contract fraud, collecting fraudulent allowances, accepting inappropriate gifts, soliciting bribes or kickbacks, and obtaining land grants for themselves and their associates, among many other schemes.⁸³ To explain their newfound wealth, politicians and officials often will make vague, hard-to-verify assertions about their preexisting or inherited wealth or the income generated by investments such as rental property or company shareholdings.⁸⁴ Many such PEPs will insist that—through savvy investing and disciplined saving—they have somehow prospered in a period of economic recession, rising living costs, and severe currency devaluation that has left millions of Nigerians struggling. To maintain a degree of plausible deniability about the origins of their wealth, many Nigerian PEPs will comingle their legitimate and unexplained earnings or launder their ill-gotten gains through businesses and properties they control. Some PEPs are genuinely wealthy before they enter government, but most are, in the words of one political journalist, “career politicians . . . who have never worked in their life but live off politics.”⁸⁵

Nigerian PEPs’ ability to accumulate illicit wealth is supposed to be constrained by the Code of Conduct Bureau (CCB), an anticorruption agency responsible for monitoring and verifying their assets. Yet the CCB itself is weak and vulnerable to political influence. The bureau’s primary function is to gather asset declarations made by all public officeholders, from the president down to the most junior functionary, at prescribed intervals. Even so, public officials suffer few consequences if they simply refuse to make these declarations, as many do.⁸⁶ Underresourced and poorly staffed, the CCB is unable to check the accuracy of all but a tiny fraction of these declarations.⁸⁷ PEPs also benefit from the veil of secrecy surrounding the CCB’s work; officials’ asset declarations are not subject to public disclosure, including via Freedom of Information Act requests.⁸⁸ As a result, it is extraordinarily difficult to determine the provenance of assets controlled by any particular Nigerian PEP.

With regard to Nigerian officials’ freedom to spend their poorly monitored assets on educating their children abroad, the Nigerian government has been reluctant to pass legislation that could constrain (or even ban) them from doing so. In 2012, the Senate neglected to pass a bill amending the constitution to discourage public officials from schooling their children abroad.⁸⁹ In 2017, the chair of the Senate’s Tertiary Education Committee dismissed calls for public officials to school their children domestically, claiming that “making a law to bar people from taking their children outside to study is something that will not be good for our country. We know that it is always good to mingle with people from other parts of the world when it comes to the issue of education.”⁹⁰

Given these weak safeguards, the modest nature of Nigerian PEPs’ official salaries, and their high risk of accumulating illicit wealth, it is reasonable to question whether they can afford big-ticket purchases such as high-end property, luxury goods, or costly tuition fees. The fast-rising average annual cost of tuition at a UK private boarding school (see table 7), for example, greatly exceeds the earnings of even Nigeria’s most senior officials.

Table 7. UK Boarding School Fees Compared to Top Nigerian PEPs’ Annual Earnings
Year	Average Annual Fee	Annual Earnings of a Minister or State Governor
2020	£35,289 (N17.1 million)	£16,082 (N7.8 million)
2019	£34,695 (N16.8 million)	£16,846 (N7.8 million)
2018	£33,684 (N16.3 million)	£16,116 (N7.8 million)
2017	£32,259 (N12.3 million)	£20,526 (N7.8 million)
2016	£30,951 (N9.1 million)	£26,531 (N7.8 million)
2015	£30,369 (N8.7 million)	£27,273 (N7.8 million)
2014	£28,788 (N7.6 million)	£29,323 (N7.8 million)
2013	£27,612 (N7.0 million	£30,830 (N7.8 million)
2012	£26,340 (N6.6 million)	£30,952 (N7.8 million)
2011	£25,152 (N6.0 million)	£32,773 (N7.8 million)
University of Aberdeen	195 (↓ 7%)	3.72%
University of Nottingham	190 (↓ 19%)	2.32%
De Montfort University	175 (↑ 25%)	3.31%
University of Leeds	175 (↓ 41%)	1.89%
University of Manchester	165 (↓ 47%)	1.14%
Note: Between 2011 and 2020, a state governor’s earnings remained constant (N7.8 million) in naira terms but fluctuated in pound sterling terms depending on the exchange rate. Naira conversions calculated using GBP/NGN exchange rate as of January 1 of each year, accessed October 2, 2020, https://www.exchangerates.org.uk/. Sources: Data published in the Independent School Council’s Annual Census, 2011–2020, accessed October 2, 2020, https://www.isc.co.uk/research/annual-census/.

A Snapshot of West African PEPs’ Spending in the UK Education Sector

The research for this paper yielded information on at least one hundred children of West African PEPs who currently attend or recently attended schools and universities in the United Kingdom. Though this finding represents only a small sample of the total number of such students, these individuals had links to thirty different independent schools and more than sixty universities. In several instances, UK educational institutions admitted the children of West African PEPs who had been convicted of corruption or had assets seized in connection with corruption-related crimes (see table 8).

A review of publicly available information on past and serving senior Nigerian politicians that have held office since 1999 revealed that most had sent one or more of their children to a UK private boarding school and/or university.⁹⁴ All of Nigeria’s presidents and vice presidents, for example, during that period had done so. Likewise, roughly 40 percent of Nigeria’s current and former state governors have educated their children in the United Kingdom (see map). A comprehensive review of current and former senators, representatives, ministers, top military officers, and other senior officials almost certainly would reveal hundreds of more examples of Nigerian PEPs whose children went to British schools. Although some would have had the legitimate assets and earnings to do so, it is likely that many more used unexplained wealth to pay for some or all of their family member’s tuition fees.

Understanding West African Elite Demand for a UK Education

To contextualize the potential corruption risks posed by West African PEPs’ high demand for a UK education, it is important to review the factors underpinning this demand. Across the region, both well-established and aspiring political, business, and cultural elites view educating their children abroad as a means of obtaining and protecting their place in domestic as well as global hierarchies. These motivations are a key focus of British-Nigerian sociologist Pere Ayling’s groundbreaking study of Nigerian elites who send their children to private boarding schools in the United Kingdom. Ayling’s research helps frame this paper because it focuses on an overlapping subset of Nigerian elite society: parents whose primary place of residence was Nigeria who had children in UK private boarding schools.⁹⁵ Most of these parents were (or were married to) company directors, top corporate executives, or successful business owners; two parents held senior government positions.⁹⁶ All had second homes in London.⁹⁷ Although Ayling did not ask her subjects about their net worth, she notes that only two of the study’s twenty subjects sent their children to schools where fees totaled less than £24,000 per year, while six subjects paid fees of more than £32,000 per child and the remainder paid amounts in between these two low and high points.⁹⁸ Most parents had two or more children in UK private boarding schools; one parent had four children doing so.⁹⁹

Drawing heavily on Ayling’s research, this paper highlights four overarching factors—traditions and ties, social distinction, domestic shortcomings, and risk avoidance—that drive West African elites’ demand for a UK education. The following sections explore each of these drivers in detail.

Traditions and ties

Many West African elites seeking to school their children in the United Kingdom received at least some of their education abroad, propelled either by their own family’s wealth and connections or by government scholarships. For many Nigerian parents in particular, a UK education is “cherished” and an “inevitable attraction,” according to one survey.¹⁰⁰

In addition to family tradition, a growing network of connections between educational institutions in West Africa and those in Europe and North America is expanding West African students’ opportunities to school overseas. Those students are able to tap into friendship and support networks that extend out into diaspora communities and increasingly transnational extended families. The proliferation of remote learning opportunities—a trend that will be accelerated by the coronavirus pandemic—will mean that UK schools and universities may soon have a new generation of virtual graduates.

In Their Own Words: Why I Attended UK Boarding School

“Going to a UK boarding school was not really a choice but a family tradition. I had the choice of choosing where I was going to; I decided my school based on location and how good the school is. My older siblings had gone to boarding school in the UK so by default I was going to boarding school in the UK. At first, I was excited because it was this whole new lifestyle abroad [but] I ended up not really liking it.”¹⁰¹

“Going to boarding school is a tradition in my family as with many Nigerian families. Before I moved to England for school, I was already in a boarding school in Nigeria. My dad thought that the education system in Nigeria was not good enough and so decided to move my siblings and I abroad.”¹⁰²

“My father picked my school, and those of my siblings, based on our respective abilities and personalities; he always claimed that he was also influenced by the schools and personalities of the friends he had at [the UK university he attended].”¹⁰³

“My older brother and his mates wanted to go abroad to school. They went, then I followed the next year. My Dad was also very focused on education, and for him, Britain was the pinnacle of education. Also, the mother of the head of our local school in Kaduna State lived near the UK boarding school we attended.”¹⁰⁴

“My parents felt like it was the next step after graduating from a British school in Nigeria. They wanted me to experience a different educational atmosphere and broaden my cultural horizon.”¹⁰⁵

“I would say that the decision to come to the UK was a decision made by my parents like many other Nigerian parents trying to provide their children with good quality education. I don’t really blame their decision given the situation in Nigeria.”¹⁰⁶

“After graduating from secondary school . . . I decided to further my education in the UK. This was not necessarily a decision I made for myself; it was more of a given that I was to go to school there. . . . The school system in Nigeria is not great, so if you have the money for it, it is typical for Nigerian parents to send their kids abroad to get a better education.”¹⁰⁷

Social distinction

Established elites view UK private boarding schools and universities as a mechanism for preserving and sustaining their social status across generations.¹⁰⁸ Aspiring elites, in contrast, see it as a means of social advancement. Conscious that wealth does not automatically garner the respect and admiration of others, many of Nigeria’s wealthiest and most powerful families see British education institutions as a way to convert their money into priceless cultural capital.¹⁰⁹

During the colonial and early post-independence period, well-to-do Nigerian families sought to have their children attend prestigious British-run schools like King’s College Lagos and Barewa College Zaria in order to bolster their academic credentials and social status. Alumni from these schools readily ascended Nigeria’s socioeconomic and political hierarchy.¹¹⁰ In contemporary Nigeria, however, private education is now widely accessible even to middle-class families; a 2015 survey of one state revealed that 80 percent of children from the wealthiest 20 percent of families attended private schools.¹¹¹ As more Nigerian students enrolled in private schools, the country’s top elites no longer viewed it as a mechanism for reproducing their status. Instead, they chose to differentiate themselves by sending their children to overseas schools, which were seen to possess even more social capital.¹¹²

To further remove themselves from the masses, many elite families also have deliberately sought out schools that accept few Nigerians, thereby conferring uniqueness and distinctiveness—and thus an additional dimension of authentic eliteness—onto their child.¹¹³ In Ayling’s study, one interviewee wanted their children to be “one of the very few Nigerians” attending their elite school.¹¹⁴ Another noted that “sending [her children] to where they will be mingling with more Blacks or Nigerians for that matter defeats the whole purpose of sending them to England in the first place.”¹¹⁵

Well-established elites also feel threatened by the rise of newly wealthy families, which they deride using colloquialisms like “Money Miss Road”—an expression suggesting that a person’s money has somehow lost its way.¹¹⁶ For the existing elite, a UK education for their children is a more desirable use of their fortunes—one that provides a more tasteful display of their wealth than the conspicuous consumption of flashy material goods or other visible luxuries. Nigeria’s nouveaux riche and aspiring elites, including many newly wealthy politicians and officials, see the decision to send their children to UK boarding schools in similar terms. They see it as an ascension strategy that will consecrate their heightened social status through the acquisition of perceived attributes of respectability.¹¹⁷

Ayling also has noted how many Nigerian elites believe that prolonged exposure to white, British upper-class lifestyles and practices will endow their children with the behaviors, comportment, and refined accent necessary to become nationally—or even globally—recognized elites.¹¹⁸ In the words of one parent, “I am not talking of the ordinary British people you see on the streets of London. . . . I want my son to copy the British aristocrats.”¹¹⁹ Ayling argues that this desire for their children to adopt white British behaviors, coupled with their disdain for Nigerian styles of learning, constituted a form of “internal racism”: the devaluation of one’s own kind in order to gain power and status.¹²⁰

Even the British private schools’ comparatively complex and expensive admission process—which can take up to two years and multiple in-person visits—reinforces Nigerian parents’ perceptions of their “world classness” and exclusivity.¹²¹ Instead of being alienated by such barriers, Nigerian elite parents see them as a virtue. In the words of one Nigerian education agent, “Boarding schools in the UK are not for the average person or people who are gathering kobo kobo together [scraping pennies]. . . . My experience tells me that people who can afford the UK are self-made millionaires and billionaires or top politicians of high caliber.”¹²² Thus, the greater the difficulty in accessing British private boarding schools, the more that Nigerian elites prize them as a venue for reproducing and affirming their own social and cultural status.

In Their Own Words: Being Nigerian at a Top UK Boarding School

“I made friends for life and did not experience any discrimination. It was a great experience. I went on to attend university in the UK but I am now back in Nigeria working.”¹²³

“Societies like Model United Nations created an atmosphere where we could address the political happenings in our countries and often race relations around the world. We also voiced our concerns when we felt certain students and/or teachers were being racist towards us. In one incident, a student was suspended for using racist language. Overall, I felt that my views were accommodated and that [those] I interacted with appreciated my diverse views and were interested in learning about my cultural background.”¹²⁴

“Unlike many independent boarding schools in the UK, the school I attended was very diverse, so I never had an ‘only Black girl in an all-white space’ experience. However, the diversity within the school did not stop the countless micro-aggressions and other forms of covert and overt racism that my friends and I experienced over the years.”¹²⁵

“Moving to the senior school, I had a very great experience as it was a lot more diverse than the prep school. There were now more people that looked like me, and I definitely found my community. We were all very comfortable being Black in a predominantly White school and village. I did get ignorant comments though. . . . Looking back now, these comments and many other incidents were definitely micro-aggressions.”¹²⁶

“I feel like, for me, it was the fact that for the first time my diversity became my identity rather than just me being a human being. I was overvalued, I was more of a political identity rather than just any other normal teenager. I was put in any and every school picture even where it wasn’t needed.”¹²⁷

“[As a Black student,] I was also always front of house when it was student events such as open days and tours. I do not know how much that had to do with my charisma or [the school] showing off that they had diversity. The experience otherwise was good if you threw yourself into student life. Subtle racism or micro-aggressions were definitely there but hidden behind a veneer of British civility.”¹²⁸

Domestic shortcomings

Since the late 1970s, long-standing mismanagement, underfunding, corruption, and a decline in teaching standards have steadily weakened Nigeria’s education sector. Despite the country’s oil wealth, Nigeria’s public primary and secondary schools rank among the worst in sub-Saharan Africa.¹²⁹ Successive governments have grossly underspent on education and allowed official corruption to sap budgets further.¹³⁰ As a result, the sector faces a “multidimensional crisis” that is both quantitative and qualitative.¹³¹ Nigerian public universities are in a similarly poor state, laid low by funding cuts, labor disputes, and violent crime on campus. One interviewee summed up the effect of these “push” factors as follows:

Our parents sponsor our education abroad . . . to ensure that we receive quality education and escape the Nigerian university system, which has unfortunately deteriorated over the years. Moreover, I am also aware of friends and relatives that have attended universities in other African countries . . . as they do not want their education stalled by the frequent strikes that occur in public Nigerian universities that often last for months. The decision to study abroad is therefore one to escape the dysfunctional Nigerian education system and have the opportunity to attend the best universities around the world.¹³²

These sentiments are widely shared and contributed to Nigerian families’ strong demand for international education opportunities.

Risk avoidance

Affluent families’ desire to send their children to schools abroad is also fueled by safety concerns.¹³³ Kidnapping for ransom is pervasive across much of Nigeria, which ranks alongside Somalia, Mexico, and Yemen as one of the world’s kidnapping hotspots.¹³⁴ Criminal gangs often target wealthy politicians and business elites or their families. Undeterred by Nigeria’s corrupt and ineffective police force, kidnappers are able to collect huge ransoms with relative ease.¹³⁵

Frequent incidences of gang violence (referred to as “cultism”) and sexual assault on Nigerian university campuses is another safety issue weighing on parents. In a 2015 hearing, one senator cited sexual assault as a reason why he and other politicians educate their children overseas: “The issue . . . is very prevalent in Nigerian universities, which is the reason why most of the senators you see here, their female children are not in Nigeria because they do not want lecturers to ask them for sex in favor of marks [academic grades].”¹³⁶ Although his comments oversimplify the dangers Nigerian university students face, they demonstrate why many elite families believe that their children will be safer if they study abroad.¹³⁷

Corruption Risks to the UK Education Sector

Independent schools and universities, whether in the United Kingdom or elsewhere in the world, face a growing set of corruption risks. These risks stem from the growth and globalization of the international education market as well as the vast quantity of corrupt and criminal proceeds flowing through the global financial system. Spiraling tuition fees at the United Kingdom’s independent schools and universities have exacerbated these risks, putting their cost on par with other high-end purchases. The costs to send one child to a British private boarding school for one year typically amount to more than the price of a new Mercedes-Benz.

UK independent schools and universities have strong financial incentives to expand their global reach. International students generally pay much higher fees than domestic and European students, creating an incentive for institutions to go to great lengths to attract and enroll them. And even though most educational institutions accept international students in good faith, it appears few fully appreciate the corruption risks a small percentage of their international students—particularly those linked to PEPs—may pose. These risks include the following:

Money laundering. Money laundering is the process of concealing the origin, ownership, or destination of illicit funds by hiding it within legitimate economic ¹³⁸ Money launderers use a variety of investments, financial transactions, and corporate mechanisms to sanitize the proceeds of crime and corruption, including the purchase of property and luxury merchandise. As purveyors of high-end goods—a world-class education—UK schools and universities are attractive money laundering targets. Third-party payments present a particularly high money laundering risk to educational institutions, even if they originate from companies registered in the United Kingdom.¹³⁹ Money launderers and tax evaders frequently use such companies to spend the proceeds of crime.¹⁴⁰
Bribery. UK private schools and universities that allow third parties (generally, an entity that is not a close family member) to pay for a student’s fees could unwittingly be facilitating bribery. Payments made by anonymous corporate entities, friends of the family, or even individuals claiming to be distant relatives could be directed to PEPs in exchange for improperly influencing policy decisions or contract awards in another country. In 2019, the NCA warned that bribery conducted via the payment of school fees was increasing.¹⁴¹
Reputation laundering. Elite educational institutions also confer respectability on dubious individuals by accepting their children as students and their philanthropy in the form of donations.¹⁴² In the words of one UK law enforcement official, “Private schools don’t just legitimise your wealth, they also legitimise your children as well.”¹⁴³ Continuing demand for controversial “golden visas”—Tier 1 investor visas that grant UK residency to individuals investing at least £2 million in the country—is driven, at least in part, by wealthy emigres’ desire to educate their children at elite British schools.¹⁴⁴
Smurfing. Students may also be used—either knowingly or unwittingly—to engage in “smurfing”: a money laundering technique by which criminals or kleptocrats move illicit wealth through numerous transfers that are too small to draw the attention of banks.¹⁴⁵ The illicit funds can then be laundered by, for instance, purchasing luxury goods or paying for school fees. In 2019, UK authorities froze ninety-five UK bank accounts—many of which belonged to foreign students—that had been used to smurf £3.6 million.¹⁴⁶ Meanwhile, a UK bank recently alerted authorities about suspicious cash deposits of over £57 million linked to 600 student bank accounts.¹⁴⁷

Anticorruption Safeguards

To counter corruption risks in the education sector, the British government has an array of safeguards of varying strength. These protections include UK laws and government policies, visa checks, Know Your Customer (KYC) protocols, institutional AML tools, and the use of SARs. When actively used in tandem, these safeguards can be highly effective in both preventing and deterring individuals from using educational institutions as a conduit for illicit financial flows to the United Kingdom. To date, however, their implementation appears inconsistent and inadequate. The sector-wide failure to submit more than a handful of SARs each year is especially problematic, as it reduces law enforcement’s visibility on possible illicit financial inflows into the country. The following sections assess the strengths and weaknesses of each of the main anticorruption safeguards capable of protecting British schools and universities from tainted funds.

Educational institutions’ AML policies

Responding to high-profile scandals and government warnings, UK educational institutions are beginning to incorporate basic anticorruption safeguards into their policies and practices. Many (though not all) schools and universities have promulgated AML policies or have added basic AML provisions to their fees or admissions policies. Even though schools and universities are not considered regulated entities under UK money laundering rules, most acknowledge that they have basic AML responsibilities under the 2002 Proceeds of Crime Act.

In March 2019, the Independent Schools’ Bursars Association (ISBA) issued an AML policy guidance note, explaining schools’ obligations under UK law, listing red flags, and outlining AML best practices and procedures.¹⁴⁸ The ISBA also suggests that schools use third-party tools, such as the Flywire tuition payment processing service—a regulated entity under UK money laundering rules—and due diligence services like Refinitiv or ParentCheck+.¹⁴⁹ These services allow schools to screen names against global sanctions lists, law enforcement databases, lists of known PEPs, and adverse media reports. Many schools now use visa advisory firms like Newland Chase to vet international applicants. As one expert noted, such external advisers are often more effective at “ringing alarm bells” and providing sobering warnings to schools that previously have been ambivalent toward AML issues.¹⁵⁰

Growing awareness of AML obligations is not the only reason UK educational institutions are seeking professional help. Some are mindful of the reputational damage suffered by schools that reportedly have accepted suspicious payments or large donations from questionable sources. Likewise, some schools are mindful that any AML failures on their part could prompt UK authorities to revoke their student visa sponsor status. Losing their ability to host international students would doom most UK private boarding schools, given their financial dependence on international students.¹⁵¹

AML Policy Exemplar: Dulwich College

Dulwich College, an independent school in southeast London, has a five-page AML policy that is more detailed and forthright than those of most other UK educational institutions. Posted on the school’s website, it spells out the school’s AML obligations under both UK law (Proceeds of Crime Act, Terrorism Act, and Money Laundering Regulations) and guidance from the Charity Commission, the government’s charity regulator. It clearly designates the school’s finance director as its money laundering reporting officer, responsible for submitting SARs to the NCA as needed.¹⁵² The policy also commits the school to providing AML training to its finance and development staff.¹⁵³

Dulwich’s AML policy also stands out because it commits the school to undertaking basic due diligence surrounding school fee payments and philanthropic donations. It helpfully lists potential red flags, which include transactions considered unusual because of their size, frequency, or manner of execution (given the parent’s or donor’s known source of income); payments involving complex or illogical arrangements that conceal the payer; payment of school fees by companies, trusts, or offshore entities; parental assets that seem inconsistent with known legitimate income; a parent who is difficult to identify; a parent who is engaged in unusual private business for someone in a prominent public position (in other words, a PEP); and a parent who is native to or resides in a high-risk country.¹⁵⁴

UK laws, regulations, and policies

Unlike other entities involved in high-value transactions, the UK education sector is subject to loose regulatory oversight by AML regulators. British schools and universities are bound by overarching anticorruption laws such as the Proceeds of Crime Act. However, government AML rules designed to improve supervision of financial institutions, casinos, dealers in luxury goods, and transaction enablers do not apply to schools and universities. Moreover, Transparency International has described the British government’s existing AML rules as weak, disjointed, and structurally unsound.¹⁵⁵

Under UK AML rules, education sector professional bodies are not even tasked (as other high-value transaction enablers are) with self-regulation under the auspices of the Financial Conduct Authority’s Office for Professional Body Anti-Money Laundering Supervision (OPBAS). Established in 2018, OPBAS facilitates collaboration and information sharing among those entities, their members, and law enforcement.¹⁵⁶ It also works with professional bodies to help them improve their AML supervision and reporting practices. UK schools and universities clearly could benefit from such AML expertise if their professional bodies were legally tasked with AML supervisory responsibilities.

When pressed on their AML responsibilities, many educational institutions reflexively acknowledge them but note that their primary function is to educate young people, not to serve as “first responders” in the fight against international corruption.¹⁵⁷ The staff of many smaller schools, for example, lacks the specialized knowledge or administrative budget to conduct enhanced due diligence on an international student from a high-risk jurisdiction. Schools and universities also reasonably argue that they should not bear the costs—or be held legally responsible—for re-vetting an international student who been issued a student visa by UK authorities, as their visa checks ideally should include rigorous scrutiny for corruption-related red flags.¹⁵⁸ Thus, any move to bring educational institutions into the UK’s AML regime should recognize that they are the last—not the first—line of defense against illicit financial flows from high-risk jurisdictions.

UK international trade policy also can play a more constructive role than it currently does. The 2019 International Education Strategy lacks any mention of anticorruption safeguards, instead focusing on how “education exports contribute to the UK’s soft power, as well as generating economic value.”¹⁵⁹ With these priorities in mind, it includes actions to improve the visa application process to “minimize any inconvenience for applicants.”¹⁶⁰ The strategy requires the Department for International Trade (DIT) Education Team to work with its UK government colleagues overseas “to identify new opportunities for the sector and support UK providers in meeting those needs.”¹⁶¹ It also stipulates that the “[DIT] will encourage independent schools to access international opportunities, using improved education exports data to identify the top countries where there is the most opportunity for UK schools.”¹⁶² This recruitment-centered approach—if indiscriminately applied to countries where corruption risks are high—could inadvertently undermine another key strategic priority: preventing illicit financial flows into the United Kingdom.

Visa checks

Looking beyond the strategic policy environment to more operational-level safeguards, visa checks rank among the most important and effective. As it stands, all international students must apply for a student visa from UK Visas and Immigration (UKVI), an agency subordinate to the Home Office, to study in the United Kingdom. To be eligible, students must attend an educational institution licensed by the Home Office to sponsor student visas.

UK student visa checks primarily focus on whether a family is able to pay their child’s tuition fees and living costs, rather than querying the origin or legitimacy of those funds. In most instances, the more funds an applicant possesses, the more credibly UKVI views their visa application.¹⁶³ As a result, the children of inexplicably wealthy PEPs often find it easier to obtain student visas than those from more modest backgrounds. This is because UKVI expects parents to have a year’s worth of school fees in their bank account at least twenty-eight days before applying for a visa in addition to having paid any deposit required by the sponsoring educational institution.¹⁶⁴

Although stronger anticorruption checks during the visa process would make it harder for West African PEPs to spend suspect funds at UK schools, they would not be a catch-all solution. Many Nigerian and Ghanaian PEPs avoid close scrutiny because they are UK passport holders or legal residents or because they hold U.S., Canadian, or EU passports. Wealthy PEPs are also able to afford the services of immigration consultants and education advisers to help them navigate a more demanding visa process. As one expert put it, “The more money you have, the more likely you are to be granted that visa.”¹⁶⁵ Many wealthy families work through education agents or visa expediting services to make it easier to obtain a visa. In the words of one British consular official, “We are 99 percent confident that all the families she [a well-known Nigerian agent] works with are genuine and meet all our criteria so we usually grant her the visas.”¹⁶⁶ Wealthy Nigerians also have the option to pay an additional £750—more than a return economy-class flight from Abuja or Lagos to London—for a twenty-four-hour “super priority” UK visa service.¹⁶⁷ It is unclear how anticorruption checks conducted at such short notice could be rigorous enough to be considered adequate.

Know Your Customer protocols

KYC protocols are another safeguard capable of protecting UK schools and universities from corruption risks. A well-established AML strategy, KYC involves conducting basic due diligence and scrutinizing applicants for potential red flags—such as applicants’ links to known PEPs. Many UK educational institutions already carry out such checks, often through local agents, but they typically focus on a prospective student’s ability to pay their fees or immigration-related factors that could jeopardize their visa application.¹⁶⁸

Many local agents pride themselves on knowing the students and families they deal with, but, as KYC mechanisms, they are only somewhat effective. As unregulated, for-profit consultants, most agents have strong financial incentives to recruit as many students as possible. Some agents receive trailing commissions from UK schools—often 10 percent of a recruited student’s fees in their first year and 5 percent in their second year—or even commission for every year that the child is at the school.¹⁶⁹ Recruiting students for pathway programs that lead to university are especially lucrative for agents, as they typically yield multiyear commissions.¹⁷⁰ This is not to say, however, that local education agents are inherently untrustworthy. Indeed, many such agents have become more reliable in recent years, as they have embraced international standards, leading to an overall improvement in KYC practices.¹⁷¹

It is not feasible, however, for UK educational institutions to make their local agents solely responsible for KYC for a few key reasons. First, in the case of private boarding schools, only 20 percent of families apply to British boarding schools via agents—the remainder apply to schools directly.¹⁷² UK universities likely receive a similar share of direct applications. West African PEPs, in particular, tend to apply directly because they want to avoid financial scrutiny from an education agent.¹⁷³ Second, many recruiters’ KYC approach is best described as ill-defined, informal, and subjective. When asked if they look at a student’s links to known PEPs, one Nigeria-based agent responded, “We don’t really look at the parents of the students, what they do, whether they are politicians. We don’t involve ourselves in what is none of our business.”¹⁷⁴ Another recruiter noted that “many Nigerians do not want to provide evidence for the source of their money,” thus impeding KYC efforts.¹⁷⁵

A more rigorous, better standardized KYC process, by contrast, gives educational institutions the option of either refusing admission and submitting a SAR—or paying for an outside expert to undertake enhanced due diligence—if it reveals potential red flags. According to one firm that carries out enhanced due diligence investigations, its work involves a “multifaceted process that takes into account economic activities (such as an individual’s work history and investment portfolio); marriage; inheritance; and any other factors that could generate net worth” aimed at “understanding where money comes from, and specifically ensuring that this wealth originates from legitimate means and does not have any links to financial crime.”¹⁷⁶ Such a detailed report would give school or university leaders the insights needed to make an informed decision about the admission of a PEP-linked student from a high-risk jurisdiction.

Suspicious Activity Reports

SARs—short submissions that provide information and intelligence to law enforcement on suspicious or possibly criminal activity—are another potent AML tool available to UK schools and universities. Such information—which often consists of contact details, alias identities, investment activity, bank accounts, and other asset information relating to an individual involved in a suspicious transaction—constitutes potential tips that can lead to new investigations or enhance ongoing law enforcement operations.¹⁷⁷

Although banks and other financial institutions frequently use and submit SARs, they are seldom employed by professionals involved in facilitating high-dollar transactions, including lawyers, accountants, and real estate agents. UK educational institutions, meanwhile, hardly ever submit SARs (see table 9), despite repeated calls from policymakers, law enforcement agencies, and their own professional bodies to do so.

UK government officials have urged the education sector to identify suspicious activity more effectively and report it to law enforcement. In 2018, then-security minister Ben Wallace advised schools and universities to “at the very least make a report to the NCA, flag it up which is the government campaign if it doesn’t smell right. If the agency comes back and says it’s wrong, that’s fine. At the moment we are not being proactive enough.”¹⁷⁸ Echoing Wallace’s comments, the NCA’s then-head of economic and cybercrime asserted that “we have a number of areas where I am identifying very, very high-risk individuals, suspect individuals, who have children in public schools.”¹⁷⁹ He added that educational institutions had “an overarching responsibility here to do more,” commenting that a carrying out a simple “Google check” to see if a pupil’s parents have possible criminal links is “hardly onerous.”¹⁸⁰ He went on to note that “suspicion is a very, very low threshold. . . . We’re not asking anybody to trace the source of money. What we’re really saying is: look, do some background checks.”¹⁸¹

UK education institutions have, for the most part, pushed back on these entreaties and defended their minimalistic use of SARs. In 2016, a leading universities trade group defended the industry record, stating that the low number of SARs the industry submitted reflected “the efforts of higher education institutions to prevent money laundering,” adding, “universities have detailed [AML] policies in place and internal reporting procedures. They outline how they will manage money laundering risks and comply with their legal obligations. These policies highlight the robust measures taken, such as putting specific limits on the size of cash transactions, and detailed checks to identify students and sources of funds.”¹⁸² However, instead of seeing SARs and other AML safeguards as threats to their exclusive global brand, UK educational institutions would be wise to routinize and publicize their use. In doing so, they would not only be more robust and resilient in the face of proliferating global corruption threats, but they would also protect their hard-earned positive reputations.

Conclusions

Illicit financial flows into UK educational institutions via West African PEPs are noteworthy and should receive greater scrutiny. While the majority of Nigerian and Ghanaian students studying in the UK are neither linked to PEPs nor represent a corruption risk, a small but significant share do. Analysis of this important and potentially problematic group reveals the following five conclusions:

Scores of West African PEPs’ children attend—or have recently graduated from—UK private boarding schools and universities. In at least six recent instances, a UK school or university admitted the child of a West African PEP that had been convicted of corruption-related crimes or had their assets seized by UK courts. Among Nigerian political elites, in particular, demand for places at UK private boarding schools and universities remains high. Enduring cultural and sociological factors underpin this demand; schooling in the United Kingdom is a proven social distinction strategy by which Nigerian elites obtain and protect their status.
Many West African PEPs pay UK school and university fees using unexplained wealth. Rapidly increasing fees, spiraling living costs, declining currency values, and stagnating salaries have made it increasingly difficult for even senior government officials to afford UK tuition fees. While many Nigerian PEPs, for example, claim they accumulated immense wealth before entering politics, very few would be able to show convincing evidence of how they did so. Indeed, other than family savings or their spouse’s salary, most civil servants and career politicians have no legitimate source of income beyond their official salary and allowances.
British schools and universities’ increasing awareness of corruption risks is necessary—but not sufficient—to forestall illicit financial flows through the UK education sector. UK schools and universities still appear reluctant to acknowledge outside criticism of the sector’s AML shortcomings or to derive lessons learned from recent anticorruption failures. Some have strengthened AML protocols and involved outside experts to conduct enhanced due diligence. Such positive developments are, however, overshadowed by educational institutions’ failure to file more than a handful of SARs each year as well as their continued willingness to matriculate students linked to known—and even convicted—kleptocrats.
UK government policies and programs seeking to boost the country’s international education sector lack a much-needed anticorruption component. Including modest AML safeguards into the UK’s International Education Strategy would not dilute its effectiveness as a blueprint for increasing education export revenues. Doing so would, however, help government and education sector stakeholders to better tailor their marketing approaches to high-risk jurisdictions like Nigeria. Over the long term, this would reduce the sector’s vulnerability to illicit financial flows.
Educational institutions in Canada, the United States, and other countries that recruit elite students from West Africa are exposing themselves to the same corruption risks as their UK counterparts. While UK private boarding schools and universities continue to be the destination of choice for the children of these PEPs, illicit financial flows from the region to boarding schools and universities in the United States, Canada, Ireland, and Australia likely will increase over the coming decade. This continued expansion of the international education market will present new anticorruption challenges for policymakers in those countries.

A stronger policy focus on the corruption vulnerabilities of the UK education sector—and the potential threat posed by transactions involving West African PEPs—will increase its contribution to the UK economy and make it a more attractive destination for international students over the long term. Improved anticorruption safeguards will also reduce UK schools’ and universities’ reputational and legal liabilities. They could also support UK international development goals by reducing “educational escapism” by elites who choose to school abroad while neglecting domestic educational institutions. The capital flight and greater foreign exchange and currency pressures associated with paying costly school and university fees have harmed these countries’ future development and prevented them from correcting deeper socioeconomic inequalities that compound underdevelopment and can even spark violent conflict. As long as PEPs flock into the education sectors of countries like the United Kingdom, Canada, and the United States instead of investing in their own sectors, West African countries will continue to suffer a “brain drain” and financial outflows that harm their economies.

Policy Implications and Recommendations

The UK education sector’s vulnerability to illicit financial flows generated by PEPs from West African countries and other high-risk regions merits greater attention from policymakers, school and university leaders, education service providers, and law enforcement. For UK policymakers keen to tap into the economic growth potential of the country’s education sector, anticorruption considerations will need to be integrated into strategies that so far have focused on improving marketing coordination among domestic stakeholders, mobilizing international trade resources, and harmonizing immigration policy. It is problematic, for example, that the Education Sector Advisory Group—a cross-governmental group working to increase international opportunities for the UK education sector—does not appear to have discussed money laundering or other corruption risks to the sector, according to a detailed review of its official minutes.¹⁸³ Any UK government-led effort to increase international student recruitment must be reconciled with other key strategic objectives, such as combating global illicit financial flows.

This said, any corrective policy changes must address these challenges holistically and should not be unreasonably burdensome to education sector stakeholders or international students. For example, if UK policymakers change or tighten the student visa process, they must do so in a way that focuses on wealthy and politically exposed applicants and avoids adding to the obstacles middle- and working-class applicants already face.¹⁸⁴ If carefully targeted, tougher, corruption-focused visa checks could be designed and implemented in a way that minimizes any negative side effects, including decreased demand for a UK education or increased perceptions of unfair discrimination. Such reforms could help advance the UK’s strategic anticorruption interests by reducing illicit financial flows into the education sector without diminishing future education exports. Any proposed policy and programmatic steps should accomplish three objectives:

Clarify responsibilities. Legislators should update UK money laundering rules to clarify the AML responsibilities of education institutions and specify situations in which they must submit SARs to the NCA. Revised legislation should also task educational sector professional bodies with self-regulation under the auspices of the Financial Conduct Authority’s OPBAS.
Strengthen gatekeepers. The UK government should review internal procedures surrounding—and the rationale behind—quick-turnaround visa issuance in high-risk corruption jurisdictions like Nigeria. UKVI should embrace its anticorruption gatekeeper role by incorporating basic AML checks into visa issuance guidance. When seeking proof of whether student visa applicants have sufficient funds to pay their tuition fees, UKVI should scrutinize the source of those funds, liaising with anticorruption and other law enforcement agencies as necessary. UKVI should also require schools and universities to have detailed AML policies in place before allowing them to sponsor student visas.
Train stakeholders. The DIT should provide AML training to the ministry’s Education Team and consider seconding an AML policy expert to it. This expert could advise the team and help it incorporate common-sense anticorruption safeguards into the UK international education marketing strategy. The UK government should also sensitize its Education Sector Advisory Group to its anticorruption concerns related to the sector.

For their part, independent schools, universities, and their intermediaries have an important role—and vested interest—in protecting the UK education sector from illicit financial flows. To start, they should strengthen internal policies and procedures designed to identify and take action in response to potential corruption risks. Both staff and institutional governing bodies should play a role in implementing them and monitoring their effectiveness. Institutions that lack detailed AML policies should emulate exemplars like Dulwich College. Education sector professional bodies like the HMC should embrace calls for reform rather than take umbrage at constructive criticism from government, the media, or anticorruption advocates.

UK educational institutions should also use the full range of AML tools, training resources, and reporting mechanisms available to them. School bursars, university finance officers, admissions staff, and recruitment agents should use due diligence services and other KYC checks (including basic internet searches) to assess risks associated with international students, especially those linked to high-risk jurisdictions like Nigeria. They should also reach out to UK law enforcement, anticorruption regulators, and outside experts for help developing or strengthening procedures for identifying suspicious transactions and submitting SARs. Many schools and universities already scrutinize their international students’ ability to pay their fees; it would not be unduly burdensome for them to conduct similar queries into students’ families’ curricula vitae and sources of income.¹⁸⁵

Nigerian and Ghanaian authorities also have a role to play in fighting educational sector corruption, both at home and abroad. To this end, their anticorruption agencies—the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission and the Independent Corrupt Practices and Other Related Offences Commission (Nigeria) and the Economic and Organized Crime Office (Ghana)—should create small but specialized units tasked with investigating educational sector corruption, including the source of tuition payments to overseas institutions. Nigeria’s legislature could also amend the Code of Conduct Act to ensure that public officials must declare the amount of tuition fees they have paid and identify the source of those funds—and to make that information, along with other information contained in officials’ asset declaration, available to the public. Looking beyond these tactical changes, however, West African countries’ education sectors clearly need more substantive fixes, recapitalization, and sustained attention from senior policymakers who—at the moment—often choose to educate their children abroad.

Acknowledgments

The program thanks Chinenye Ugonna for her outstanding research assistance. Thanks also to Pere Ayling, as well as the many other experts and Nigerian alumni of UK private boarding schools and universities whose knowledge, insights, and experiences greatly enriched this paper.

Notes

¹ This estimated amount was calculated using recent school and university census data, average school and university fees for the 2019/2020 academic year, and the author’s more speculative estimate that about 5 percent of UK university students and 30 percent of UK private boarding school students from West African countries have financial links to PEPs. This amount does not include nontuition expenditures such as travel, accommodation, and other living costs, which often equal or exceed annual tuition fees. Nor does it include tuition fees paid by dual citizens. Up to 50 percent of Nigerian students at UK schools and universities are dual nationals and are therefore counted as domestic (UK) students in institutions’ census returns. This amount therefore represents a conservative estimate of unexplained wealth flowing into the UK education sector via West African PEPs.

² Researcher interview with Political Journalist B (letters designated for ease of attribution, as necessary), September 15, 2020; and Mark Brooks, “Nigeria: An Analysis of the Market in Nigeria for School-Age Education in the UK and Recommendations on the Most Effective Ways for Education Providers in the UK of School-Aged Education to Market Themselves in Nigeria,” British Council, November 2011, unpublished, 20.

³ Juliette Garside, “Elite UK School Fees Paid Via Tax Haven Firms, Leak Reveals,” Guardian, March 5, 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/education/2019/mar/05/elite-uk-school-fees-paid-via-tax-haven-firms-leak-reveals; and Steve Goodrich (ed.), Ben Cowdock, and Gabriele Simeone, “At Your Service: Investigating How UK Businesses and Institutions Help Corrupt Individuals and Regimes Launder Their Money and Reputations,” Transparency International UK, October 24, 2019, 33.

⁴ Jim Armitage, “Top Private Schools ‘Unwittingly Take Laundered Money from Criminals,’” Independent, October 17, 2014, https://www.independent.co.uk/news/education/top-private-schools-unwittingly-accepting-laundered-money-wealthy-foreign-criminals-moldovan-police-occrp-a7640811.html.

⁵ Goodrich, Cowdock, and Simeone, “At Your Service,” inside cover.

⁶ Goodrich, Cowdock, and Simeone, “At Your Service,” inside cover and 13.

⁷ Goodrich, Cowdock, and Simeone, “At Your Service,” 7.

⁸ Pippa Crerar, “Money-Laundering Crackdown on Public Schools and Law Firms,” Guardian, November 1, 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/nov/01/money-laundering-crackdown-on-public-schools-and-law-firms-.

⁹ Camilla Turner, “Private Schools Should Tell Police If Parents Try to Pay Fees in Cash, NCA Chief Says,” Telegraph, December 3, 2018, https://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/2018/12/03/private-schools-should-flag-parents-try-pay-fees-cash-police/.

¹⁰ Julie Robinson, “ISC Statement Outlining Schools’ Duties Under Money Laundering Legislation,” Independent Schools Council, November 1, 2018, https://www.isc.co.uk/media-enquiries/news-press-releases-statements/isc-statement-outlining-schools-duties-under-money-laundering-legislation/; and Julie Robinson, “ISC Statement: The Importance of Vigilance Around the Source of Payments Received by Schools,” Independent Schools Council, March 6, 2019, https://www.isc.co.uk/media-enquiries/news-press-releases-statements/vigilance-around-the-source-of-payments/.

¹¹ Statement by Mike Buchanan, Executive Director of the Headmasters and Headmistresses’ Conference (HMC), November 1, 2018, https://www.hmc.org.uk/blog/hmc-statement-robust-systems-hmc-schools-reporting-suspicious-funds/; Mike Buchanan, “HMC Schools Are Acutely Aware of Their Duties to Report Any Concerns Over the Provenance of Money They Are Receiving,” March 6, 2019, https://www.hmc.org.uk/blog/hmc-statement-hmc-schools-acutely-aware-duties-report-concerns-provenance-money-receiving/. HMC is a professional association comprising heads of the world’s leading independent schools.

¹² “Nigerian Serial Fraudster and British Partner Lose More Than £1Million of Assets,” National Crime Agency (NCA), July 14, 2020, https://www.nationalcrimeagency.gov.uk/news/nigerian-serial-fraudster-and-british-partner-lose-more-than-1million-of-assets.

¹³ Pere Ayling, Distinction, Exclusivity and Whiteness: Elite Nigerian Parents and the International Education Market (Singapore: Springer, 2019), 8–9.

¹⁴ “UK Revenue From Education Related Exports and Transnational Education Activity in 2016,” UK Department for Education, January 24, 2019, https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/773167/SFR_Education_Exports_2016.pdf.

¹⁵ “International Education Strategy: Global Potential, Global Growth,” London: HM Government, March 2019, 2, https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/799349/International_Education_Strategy_Accessible.pdf.

¹⁶ “International Education Strategy,” 21.

¹⁷ Suzanne Rowse, “The Latest Intelligence on International Boarding Markets—May 2019,” British Boarding Schools Network, accessed October 5, 2020, https://www.amcis.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/Suzanne-Rowse.pdf.

¹⁸ Rowse, “Latest Intelligence on International Boarding Markets.”

¹⁹ Sara Custer, “Nigeria’s Continued Forex Woes Curb UK Study, Agencies Report,” PIE News, August 22, 2016, https://thepienews.com/news/nigerias-continued-forex-woes-curb-uk-study-agencies-report/; and author interview with an education consultant, July 7, 2020.

²⁰ “Unfair for Buhari to Ban Forex for Nigerian Students While His Kids Study Abroad Says Senator,” NewsWireNGR, March 7, 2016, https://newswirengr.com/2016/03/07/unfair-for-buhari-to-ban-forex-for-nigerian-students-while-his-kids-study-abroad-says-senator/.

²¹ Custer, “Nigeria’s Continued Forex Woes Curb UK Study, Agencies Report”; and author interview with a university counselor at a Nigeria-based sixth-form college, July 9, 2020.

²² Beckie Smith, “Nigeria Issues Welcome Reform to Forex for Overseas Study,” PIE News, February 23, 2017, https://thepienews.com/news/nigeria-reform-forex-overseas-study/.

²³ Author interview with an education consultant, July 3, 2020.

²⁴ Ibid.

²⁵ Brooks, “Nigeria.”

²⁶ Author interview with an education consultant, July 3, 2020.

²⁷ Author interview with a university counselor at a Nigeria-based sixth-form college, July 9, 2020; Brooks, “Nigeria,” 25. Abuja replaced Lagos as the capital of Nigeria in 1991.

²⁸ Brooks, “Nigeria,” 22.

²⁹ Author interview with an education consultant, July 3, 2020.

³⁰ Ibid.

³¹ Ibid.

³² Rowse, “Latest Intelligence on International Boarding Markets.”

³³ UK Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA), “Top Ten Non-European Union Countries of Domicile in 2017/18 for HE Student Enrolments by Country of HE Provider and First Year Marker,” accessed October 7, 2020, https://www.hesa.ac.uk/data-and-analysis/sb252/figure-11.

³⁴ Author interview with a UK-based education consultant, July 7, 2020.

³⁵ “A Sustainable Future for International Students in the UK: All-Party Parliamentary Group for International Students Inquiry Report,” All-Party Parliamentary Group for International Students, 2018, http://www.exeduk.com/appg-for-international-students/inquiry/report, 14.

³⁶ Author interview with a Nigeria-based education consultant, July 8, 2020.

³⁷ Author interview with a university counselor at a Nigeria-based sixth-form college, July 9, 2020.

³⁸ Author interview with a Nigeria-based education consultant, July 8, 2020.

³⁹ Author interview with a UK-based education consultant, July 7, 2020.

⁴⁰ Author interview with a UK-based education consultant, July 7, 2020. The Russell Group is an association of the United Kingdom’s twenty-four top universities. For a list of its members, see https://russellgroup.ac.uk/about/our-universities/.

⁴¹ Author interview with a UK-based education consultant, July 7, 2020.

⁴² Author interview with a university counselor at a Nigeria-based sixth-form college, July 9, 2020.

⁴³ Custer, “Nigeria’s Continued Forex Woes Curb UK Study, Agencies Report.”

⁴⁴ Viggo Stacey, “Canada: Nigeria Visa Scheme Is ‘Game Changer,’” PIE News, February 4, 2020, https://thepienews.com/news/canada-express-nigeria-visa-service-real-game-changer/.

⁴⁵ Author interview with a UK-based education consultant, July 7, 2020.

⁴⁶ Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada, “Canada—Study Permit Holders With a Valid Permit on December 31st by Country of Citizenship, 2000–2019,” accessed September 29, 2020, https://open.canada.ca/data/en/dataset/90115b00-f9b8-49e8-afa3-b4cff8facaee.

⁴⁷ “International Students by Place of Origin, Selected Years, 1949/50–2018/19,” Open Doors Report on International Educational Exchange, Institute of International Education, 2019, accessed October 7, 2020, http://www.iie.org/opendoors; and “13,423 Nigerian Students Contributed $514 Million to U.S. Economy in 2018—Report,” Premium Times, November 20, 2019, https://www.premiumtimesng.com/news/more-news/364274-13423-nigerian-students-contributed-514-million-to-u-s-economy-in-2018-report.html.

⁴⁸ Author interview with a Nigeria-based education consultant, July 8, 2020.

⁴⁹ Custer, “Nigeria’s Continued Forex Woes Curb UK Study, Agencies Report”; and author interview with a university counselor at a Nigeria-based sixth-form college, July 9, 2020.

⁵⁰ “2020/2021 Overseas Postgraduate Scholarship Scheme Under PTDF Strategic Partnerships in UK,” Petroleum Technology Development Fund, undated, accessed October 6, 2020, https://ptdf.gov.ng/2020-2021-overseas-postgraduate-scholarship-scheme-under-ptdf-strategic-partnerships-in-uk.

⁵¹ Unless otherwise noted, all NGN/GBP Naira conversions calculated using GBP/NGN exchange rate (£1=N485) as of January 1, 2020, accessed October 2, 2020, https://www.exchangerates.org.uk/; and Bassey Udo, “PTDF: Nigeria Spent N120 Billion on Project Whose Impact ‘Cannot Be Ascertained,’” Premium Times, October 5, 2019, https://www.premiumtimesng.com/news/headlines/356051-ptdf-nigeria-spent-n120-billion-on-project-whose-impact-cannot-be-ascertained.html.

⁵² “Report on Revenues, Deductions, Analysis of Disbursement and Utilization of Funds of the Federal Beneficiary Agencies 2012–2016—Petroleum Technology Trust Fund (PTDF),” Nigeria Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative, 2019, 34, https://neiti.gov.ng/index.php/neiti-audits/fiscal-allocation-and-statutory-disbursement/category/190-fasd-2012-2016-beneficiary-agencies-reports?download=870:fasd-2012-2016-ptdf-report.

⁵³ Isaac Anyaogu, “Amid Fraud Allegations, Students on NDDC, PTDF Scholarship Stranded Abroad,” Business Day, July 15, 2020, https://www.pressreader.com/nigeria/business-day-nigeria/20200715/281505048520992; and author interview with a UK-based academic, July 21, 2020.

⁵⁴ Azimazi Momoh Jimoh, “Senate Panel Probes Alleged Fraud in Scholarship Board,” Guardian, January 10, 2018, https://guardian.ng/news/senate-panel-probes-alleged-fraud-in-scholarship-board/.

⁵⁵ “Federal Scholarship Board Sponsors Ineligible Candidates for Foreign Trainings,” Economic Confidential, October 4, 2020, https://economicconfidential.com/2020/10/federal-scholarship-board/.

⁵⁶ QueenEsther Iroanusi, “NDDC Paid Officials N85.6m to Attend UK Graduation Ceremony During Lockdown,” Premium Times, August 8, 2020, https://www.premiumtimesng.com/news/headlines/407475-nddc-paid-officials-n85-6m-to-attend-uk-graduation-ceremony-during-lockdown.html.

⁵⁷ Iroanusi, “NDDC Paid Officials N85.6m to Attend UK Graduation Ceremony During Lockdown.”

⁵⁸ The defendant pleaded not guilty and the trial is still ongoing as of October 2020. See “EFCC Arraigns Ex-Scholarship Board Boss Over N127m Fraud,” PM News, July 2, 2020, https://www.pmnewsnigeria.com/2020/07/02/efcc-arraigns-ex-scholarship-board-boss-over-n127m-fraud /.

⁵⁹ The defendants pleaded not guilty, and the trial was ongoing as of October 2020. Kunle Sanni, “EFCC Arraigns Ex-Kwara Scholarship Board Chair, Two Others for Bursary Fraud,” Premium Times, January 16, 2020, https://www.premiumtimesng.com/regional/north-central/372953-efcc-arraigns-ex-kwara-scholarship-board-chair-two-others-for-bursary-fraud.html.

⁶⁰ Author interview with a Nigeria-based education consultant, July 8, 2020.

⁶¹ Author interview with a UK-based academic, July 21, 2020.

⁶² Author interview with an education consultant, July 7, 2020.

⁶³ Author interview with an education consultant, July 7, 2020.

⁶⁴ Charlotte Edmond, “Ghana Will Grow Faster Than Any Other Economy This Year, the IMF Says Why,” World Economic Forum, May 24, 2019, https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2019/05/ghana-is-set-to-be-the-worlds-fastest-growing-economy-this-year-according-to-the-imf/.

⁶⁵ Author interview with an education consultant, 3 July 2020; and Viggo Stacey, “UK Boarding Schools to Meet ‘Surge’ in Ghana,” PIE News, May 7, 2019, https://thepienews.com/news/uk-boarding-schools-to-meet-surging-ghanian-demand/.

⁶⁶ Author interview with a Ghanaian corruption expert, July 7, 2020.

⁶⁷ Author interview with an education consultant, July 7, 2020.

⁶⁸ “Why Auditor-General Audited GETFund and Said Many Scholarship Beneficiaries Were Not Needy,” Graphic Online, February 24, 2020, https://www.graphic.com.gh/news/politics/why-auditor-general-audited-getfund-and-found-many-scholarship-beneficiaries-were-not-needy.html.

⁶⁹ Author interview with a Ghanaian corruption expert, July 7, 2020.

⁷⁰ Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada, “Study Permit Holders.”

⁷¹ Author interview with an education consultant, July 3, 2020.

⁷² “Migration Profile: Libya,” Migration Policy Center, European University Institute, June 2013, 2, https://migrationpolicycentre.eu/docs/migration_profiles/Libya.pdf.

⁷³ UK Home Office, Entry Clearance Visas Tables, Volume 2, accessed October 1, 2020, https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/709287/entry-visas2-mar-2018-tables.ods.

⁷⁴ “Nigerian Govt Identifies 130,000 Individuals, Firms Likely Culpable in Tax Underpayment—Adeosun,” Premium Times, March 6, 2018, https://www.premiumtimesng.com/news/headlines/260847-nigerian-govt-identifies-130000-individuals-firms-likely-culpable-tax-underpayment-adeosun.html.

⁷⁵ UK HESA, “Top Ten Non-European Union Countries of Domicile in 2017/18 for HE Student Enrolments by Country of HE Provider and First Year Marker”; and “Independent School Council Annual Census, 2017,” accessed October 2, 2020, https://www.isc.co.uk/research/annual-census/.

⁷⁶ Jo Golding, “Financial Risk Management,” Independent Education Today, March 19, 2019, https://ie-today.co.uk/law-finance-hr/financial-risk-management/.

⁷⁷ Researcher interview with Political Journalist C, September 16, 2020.

⁷⁸ “Akufo-Addo’s 110 Ministers to Swallow GHC20m Yearly as Salary,” GhanaWeb, March 15, 2017, https://www.ghanaweb.com/GhanaHomePage/NewsArchive/Akufo-Addo-s-110-ministers-to-swallow-GHC20m-yearly-as-salary-519104.

⁷⁹ “Remuneration Package for Political, Public and Judicial Office Holders,” Revenue Mobilization Allocation and Fiscal Commission, accessed October 14, 2020, https://rmafc.gov.ng/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/Remuneration-Package-for-Political-and-Judicial-Office-Holders-.pdf.

⁸⁰ National Salaries, Incomes and Wages Commission, “Circular SWC.04/Vol.X/722—Implementation of the New National Minimum Wage in the Federal Public Service: The Consolidated Public Service Salary Structure (CONPSS),” November 14, 2019, https://nsiwc.gov.ng/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/The-Consolidated-Public-Service-Salary-Structure-CONPSS.pdf.

⁸¹ National Salaries, Incomes and Wages Commission, “Circular SWC/S/04/VIII/298—Review of the Consolidated Public Service Salary Structure,” July 1, 2010, https://nairametrics.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/CONPSS-2010.pdf.

⁸² Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, Fifth Schedule, Part I, §2 (c), 1999, http://ilo.org/dyn/natlex/docs/ELECTRONIC/54097/99986/F774356846/NGA54097%202.pdf.

⁸³ See Matthew T. Page, “A New Taxonomy of Corruption in Nigeria,” Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, July 17, 2018, https://carnegieendowment.org/files/CP_338_Page_Nigeria_FINAL.pdf; and researcher interview with Political Journalist B, September 15, 2020.

⁸⁴ Researcher interview with Journalist E, September 17, 2020.

⁸⁵ Researcher interview with Political Journalist A, September 14, 2020.

⁸⁶ “Many Nigerian Public Officials Not Complying With Asset Declaration Law—CCB,” Premium Times, October 6, 2019, https://allafrica.com/stories/201910060063.html.

⁸⁷ Author interview with a senior CCB official, September 25, 2019.

⁸⁸ Yusuf Akinpelu, “Why CCB Will Not Release Asset Declarations of Buhari, Osinbajo, Others—Official,” Premium Times, October 7, 2019, https://allafrica.com/stories/201910070400.html.

⁸⁹ Isiaka Wakili, “Senate to Bar Public Officials’ Children From Schooling Abroad,” Daily Trust, October 5, 2012, https://allafrica.com/stories/201210050431.html.

⁹⁰ “Why We Can’t Stop Public Officials From Sending Their Children to School Abroad—Senate,” Nigerian News Web, August 17, 2017, https://nigeriannewsweb.com/2017/08/17/we-cant-stop-children-of-public-officials-from-schooling-abroad-senate/.

⁹¹ Evelyn Okakwu, “Appeal Court Reduces Ex-Gov Joshua Dariye’s Jail Term,” Premium Times, November 16, 2018, https://www.premiumtimesng.com/news/headlines/296023-breaking-appeal-court-reduces-ex-gov-joshua-dariyes-jail-term.html.

⁹² Mark Train, “Former Nigeria State Governor James Ibori Receives 13-Year Sentence,” Guardian, April 17, 2012, https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2012/apr/17/nigeria-governor-james-ibori-sentenced.

⁹³ Annabelle Timsit, “The UK Wants Private Schools to Stop Letting Criminals Pay for Elite Educations,” Quartz, September 17, 2018, https://qz.com/1392063/money-laundering-in-the-uk-private-schools-in-the-crosshairs/.

⁹⁴ These open sources included media reports; press releases; social media posts and profiles belonging to PEPs, their family members, and supports; and information posted to school and university websites and alumni organizations, among other sources.

⁹⁵ Ayling uses David Boyd’s nine characteristics of “elites in modern democratic society”: high occupational position; minority status; high status; a distinctive style of life; group consciousness but openness; exclusiveness but openness; functional capability and responsibility; moral responsibility; and power of varying degree. For more see David Boyd, Elites and Their Education (Windsor: National Foundation for Educational Research, 1973), 16; and Pere Ayling, “Embodying ‘Britishness’: The (Re)making of the Contemporary Nigerian Elite Child,” Curriculum Inquiry 45, no. 5 (2015): 461.

⁹⁶ Ayling, “Embodying ‘Britishness,’” 462.

⁹⁷ Ayling, Distinction, Exclusivity and Whiteness, 8–9.

⁹⁸ Ayling, Distinction, Exclusivity and Whiteness.

⁹⁹ Ibid.

¹⁰⁰ Brooks, “Nigeria,” 6.

¹⁰¹ Researcher interview with Person N (a former student at a top UK boarding school), July 1, 2020.

¹⁰² Researcher interview with Person M (a female former student at a top UK boarding school), July 1, 2020.

¹⁰³ Author interview with Person Q (a male former student at a top UK boarding school), July 9, 2020.

¹⁰⁴ Author interview with Person R (a male former student at a UK boarding school), June 30, 2020.

¹⁰⁵ Researcher interview with Person G (a former student at a UK boarding school), July 1, 2020.

¹⁰⁶ Researcher interview with Person K (a former student at a UK boarding school), July 1, 2020.

¹⁰⁷ Researcher interviewee with Person L (a former student at a UK boarding school), July 1, 2020.

¹⁰⁸ Ayling, Distinction, Exclusivity and Whiteness, 8–9.

¹⁰⁹ Ayling, “Embodying ‘Britishness,’” 464.

¹¹⁰ Ayling, “Embodying ‘Britishness.’”

¹¹¹ Joanna Härmä, “Why Low-Fee Private Schools Are Struggling to Take Root in Rural Nigeria,” The Conversation, July 20, 2016, https://theconversation.com/why-low-fee-private-schools-are-struggling-to-take-root-in-rural-nigeria-62664.

¹¹² Ayling, Distinction, Exclusivity and Whiteness, 59.

¹¹³ Ayling, “Embodying ‘Britishness,’” 462.

¹¹⁴ Ayling, “Embodying ‘Britishness.’”

¹¹⁵ Ayling, Distinction, Exclusivity and Whiteness, 92–93.

¹¹⁶ Ayling, Distinction, Exclusivity and Whiteness, 91.

¹¹⁷ Ayling, Distinction, Exclusivity and Whiteness, 3, 67, 119.

¹¹⁸ Ayling, “Embodying ‘Britishness,’” 455–56.

¹¹⁹ Ayling, “Embodying ‘Britishness.’”

¹²⁰ Ayling, Distinction, Exclusivity and Whiteness, 63–64, 100.

¹²¹ Ayling, Distinction, Exclusivity and Whiteness, 73.

¹²² Ayling, Distinction, Exclusivity and Whiteness, 82.

¹²³ Author interview with Person R (a male former student at a private UK boarding school), June 30, 2020.

¹²⁴ Researcher interview with Person F (a female former student at a top UK boarding school), July 1, 2020.

¹²⁵ Researcher interview with Person H (a female former student at a private UK boarding school), July 1, 2020.

¹²⁶ Researcher interview with Person M (a female former student at a private UK boarding school), July 1, 2020.

¹²⁷ Researcher interview with Person N (a former student at a private UK boarding school), July 1, 2020.

¹²⁸ Researcher interview with Person P (a former student at a private UK boarding school), July 1, 2020.

¹²⁹ Kirsten Majgaard and Alain Mingat, Education in Sub-Saharan Africa: A Comparative Analysis (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2008), http://documents1.worldbank.org/curated/en/892631468003571777/pdf/709790PUB0EPI0067926B09780821388891.pdf.

¹³⁰ John Ameh and Olaleye Aluko, “2019 Budget: Education Gets N620.5bn, Against UNESCO’s Advice,” Punch, January 4, 2019, https://punchng.com/2019-budget-education-gets-n620-5bn-against-unescos-advice/; and Chidimma C. Okeke, “Nigeria’s Education Budgets Below 11%—BudgIT,” Daily Trust, March 22, 2019, https://dailytrust.com/nigerias-education-budgets-below-11-budgit.

¹³¹ “DFID’s Programme in Nigeria,” House of Commons International Development Committee Report, 2009, https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200809/cmselect/cmintdev/840/84006.htm#a17.

¹³² Author interview with Person F (a female former student at a top UK boarding school), July 1, 2020.

¹³³ Brooks, “Nigeria,” 6, 20.

¹³⁴ Chukwuma Al Okoli, “Kidnapping for Ransom Has Become Nigeria’s Latest Security Problem,” Quartz Africa, May 21, 2019, https://qz.com/africa/1624376/kidnapping-for-ransom-is-nigerias-latest-security-problem/.

¹³⁵ Ibid.

¹³⁶ Taiwo George, “Akpabio: We Don’t Send Our Daughters to Nigerian Varsities for Fear of Sexual Assault,” The Cable, October 27, 2015, https://www.thecable.ng/senators-dont-send-daughters-nigerian-universities-sexual-assault-says-akpabio.

¹³⁷ Brooks, “Nigeria,”, 38.

¹³⁸ “Don’t Look, Won’t Find: Weaknesses in the Supervision of the UK’s Anti-Money Laundering Rules,” Transparency International UK, 2015, 7, https://www.transparency.org.uk/sites/default/files/pdf/publications/TI_UK_Dont_Look_Wont_Find.pdf.

¹³⁹ Luke Harding and Nick Hopkins, “How ‘Dirty Money’ From Russia Flooded Into the UK—and Where It Went,” Guardian, March 20, 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/mar/20/how-dirty-money-from-russia-flooded-into-the-uk-and-where-it-went.

¹⁴⁰ Alyson Howard, “Money Laundering—What Is the Independent School Sector to Do?” Independent Schools Magazine, March 2019, http://www.independentschoolsmagazine.co.uk/PDFs/march-2019.pdf.

¹⁴¹ UK National Crime Agency and the National Economic Crime Centre, “Public Private Threat Update—Economic Crime: Key Judgements,” July 2019, https://nationalcrimeagency.gov.uk/who-we-are/publications/323-public-private-threat-update-2019-economic-crime/file.

¹⁴² Sean O’Neill, “Dirty Foreign Money Could Be Paying School and University Fees,” Times, June 11, 2016, https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/dirty-foreign-money-could-be-paying-school-and-university-fees-x0w7s6rvf.

¹⁴³ Paul Peachey, “UK Puts Private Schools on Notice Over Dirty Cash,” The National, November 1, 2018, https://www.thenational.ae/world/europe/uk-puts-private-schools-on-notice-over-dirty-cash-1.787143.

¹⁴⁴ David Prosser, “Money Laundering Goes Back to School,” Arachnys, November 5, 2019, https://www.arachnys.com/money-laundering-goes-back-to-school/.

¹⁴⁵ Luke Cooper, “This Is the Unusual Money Laundering Method of ‘Cuckoo Smurfing,’” HuffPost Australia, August 3, 2017, https://www.huffingtonpost.com.au/2017/08/03/this-is-the-unusual-money-laundering-method-of-cuckoo-smurfing_a_23062608.

¹⁴⁶ Barney Thompson, “Students’ Bank Accounts Frozen Amid Money Laundering Concerns,” Financial Times, February 28, 2019, https://www.ft.com/content/96840328-3b6b-11e9-b856-5404d3811663.

¹⁴⁷ “Overseas Students Identified as Money Laundering Targets,” Wrigleys Solicitors (blog), May 21, 2020, https://www.wrigleys.co.uk/news/education/overseas-students-identified-as-money-laundering-targets/.

¹⁴⁸ Independent Schools’ Bursars Association, “ISBA Publishes Revised Anti-Money Laundering Guidance,” March 8, 2019, https://www.theisba.org.uk/news/2019/isba-publishes-revised-anti-money-laundering-guidance.aspx.

¹⁴⁹ Independent Schools’ Bursars Association, “ISBA Publishes Revised Anti-Money Laundering Guidance,” 5–6.

¹⁵⁰ Author interview with an education consultant, July 3, 2020.

¹⁵¹ Author interview with an education consultant, July 3, 2020.

¹⁵² Dulwich College, “Anti-Money Laundering Policy,” 2019, https://www.dulwich.org.uk/uploaded/documents/About_Us/Policies/General_Policies/Anti-Money_Laundering_Policy.pdf.

¹⁵³ Dulwich College, “Anti-Money Laundering Policy,” 5.

¹⁵⁴ Dulwich College, “Anti-Money Laundering Policy,” 3–4.

¹⁵⁵ “Don’t Look, Won’t Find: Weaknesses in the Supervision of the UK’s Anti-Money Laundering Rules,” 5–6; and Goodrich, Cowdock, and Simeone, “At Your Service,” 4.

¹⁵⁶ “Office for Professional Body Anti-Money Laundering Supervision,” Financial Conduct Authority, May 13, 2020, https://www.fca.org.uk/opbas.

¹⁵⁷ Interview with a UK-based academic, July 21, 2020.

¹⁵⁸ Interview with a UK-based academic, July 21, 2020.

¹⁵⁹ “International Education Strategy,” 15.

¹⁶⁰ “International Education Strategy, 13.

¹⁶¹ “International Education Strategy.”

¹⁶² “International Education Strategy,” 29.

¹⁶³ Email to author from a UK consular official, received December 3, 2020.

¹⁶⁴ Ayling, Distinction, Exclusivity and Whiteness, 82; email to author from a UK consular official, received December 3, 2020.

¹⁶⁵ Interview with a UK-based academic, July 21, 2020.

¹⁶⁶ Ayling, Distinction, Exclusivity and Whiteness, 84.

¹⁶⁷ UK Visas and Immigration, “Super Priority Visa Service Nigeria Frequently Asked Questions—Customer Pack,” undated, accessed October 25, 2020, https://static.tlscontact.com/media/ng/abv/uk/spv_faqs_nigeria_final.pdf.

¹⁶⁸ Author interview with an education consultant, July 3, 2020; and author interview with an education consultant, July 7, 2020.

¹⁶⁹ Brooks, “Nigeria,” 21.

¹⁷⁰ Author interview with an education consultant, July 7, 2020.

¹⁷¹ Author interview with an education consultant, July 7, 2020.

¹⁷² Brooks, “Nigeria,” 7.

¹⁷³ Author interview with a Nigeria-based education consultant, July 8, 2020.

¹⁷⁴ Author interview with a Nigeria-based education consultant, July 9, 2020.

¹⁷⁵ Brooks, “Nigeria,” 31.

¹⁷⁶ Sylwia Wolos, “Back to School—Do You Know Who Is Paying Your Fees?,” Refinitiv Expert Talk (blog), August 27, 2019, 1, https://www.refinitiv.com/content/dam/marketing/en_us/documents/expert-talks/back-to-school.pdf.

¹⁷⁷ NCA, “Suspicious Activity Reports,” undated, accessed October 25, 2020, https://www.nationalcrimeagency.gov.uk/what-we-do/crime-threats/money-laundering-and-illicit-finance/suspicious-activity-reports.

¹⁷⁸ Charles Hymas, “Private Schools Could Be Laundering Money, Security Minister Warns as He Launches Serious Crime Strategy,” Telegraph, November 1, 2018, https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/11/01/serious-organised-crime-costs-uk-economy-37bn-year/.

¹⁷⁹ Turner, “Private Schools Should Tell Police.”

¹⁸⁰ Ibid.

¹⁸¹ Ibid.

¹⁸² O’Neill, “Dirty Foreign Money Could Be Paying School and University Fees.”

¹⁸³ See Department for International Trade and Department for Education, “Education Sector Advisory Group minutes,” accessed October 20, 2020, https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/education-sector-advisory-group-minutes.

¹⁸⁴ For more on how the privatization of the UK visa process has made it more difficult for working-class applicants—and easier for the wealthy—to obtain visas by paying for premium, expedited treatment, see Temitayo Olofinlua, “The Hidden Costs of Getting a UK Visa,” African Arguments, July 30, 2020, https://africanarguments.org/2020/07/the-hidden-costs-of-getting-a-uk-visa/.

¹⁸⁵ Author interview with a Nigeria-based education consultant, July 9, 2020. End of document

West African Elites’ Spending on UK Schools and Universities: A Closer Look

Matthew T. Page

January 28, 2021
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Summary

Matthew T. Page

Matthew T. Page is a nonresident scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

Key Findings

Scores of West African PEPs’ children attend—or have recently graduated from—UK private boarding schools and universities. These include some that had been convicted of corruption-related crimes or had their assets seized by British courts. Among Nigerian political elites in particular, demand for places at UK private boarding schools and universities will remain high, exacerbating corruption risks to the country’s education sector.
The overwhelming majority of West African students in the United Kingdom pose little or no corruption risk; their families do not possess unexplained wealth and they are not linked to PEPs. However, many West African PEPs appear to be using unexplained wealth to pay for UK school and university fees. Stagnating salaries, rapidly increasing tuition and living costs, and declining currency values have made it increasingly difficult for some senior government officials to legitimately afford the cost of a UK education. Financial flows involving students linked to these officials may require closer scrutiny.
British schools and universities’ increasing awareness of money laundering risks is necessary—but not sufficient—to forestall illicit financial flows through the UK education sector. Many institutions still appear reluctant to acknowledge outside criticism of the sector’s anticorruption shortcomings or learn from recent scandals. Some have strengthened their anticorruption protocols, but many are still reluctant to report suspicious transactions.
The British government policies and programs created to boost the country’s international education sector lack a much-needed anticorruption component. Including modest anticorruption safeguards into the UK’s International Education Strategy would help government and education sector stakeholders to better tailor their marketing approaches to high-risk jurisdictions like Nigeria. Over the long term, these safeguards would reduce the sector’s vulnerability to illicit financial flows.
Educational institutions in Canada, the United States, and other countries that recruit elite students from West Africa are exposing themselves to the same corruption risks as their British counterparts. Although the UK education sector continues to attract West African PEPs, illicit financial flows from the region to boarding schools and universities in other Anglophone countries likely will increase over the coming decade, posing new anticorruption challenges for their policymakers.

Policy Implications and Recommendations

The UK education sector’s vulnerability to illicit financial flows generated by PEPs—both in West Africa and beyond—merits greater attention from policymakers, school and university leaders, education service providers, and law enforcement. Any effort by British policymakers to expand international education exports needs to be reconciled with other national strategic objectives, like combating global illicit financial flows. Otherwise, the recruitment of more wealthy students from corruption-prone, highly impoverished countries like Nigeria could handicap these countries’ socioeconomic development by enabling capital flight, amplifying foreign exchange and currency pressures, and reinforcing domestic educational disparities.
Any corrective policy changes must address these challenges holistically and should not be unreasonably burdensome to education sector stakeholders or international students. They should be structured to advance the United Kingdom’s strategic anticorruption interests by reducing illicit financial flows into the education sector without diminishing its international education export capacity. To do so, UK policymakers should take steps to clarify the education sector’s AML responsibilities, strengthen the anticorruption capacity of immigration officials and other gatekeepers, and provide anticorruption training and advice to key education sector stakeholders.
For their part, the United Kingdom’s independent schools, universities, and their intermediaries also have an important role and a clear interest in protecting the education sector from illicit financial flows. To start, they should strengthen internal policies and procedures designed to identify and respond to potential corruption risks. At the same time, education sector professional bodies should embrace calls for reform rather than reflexively bristle at constructive criticism from government, the media, or anticorruption advocates.

Introduction

Putting a Regional Problem Into Global Context

Methodology Note

West African Elites’ in UK Schools and Universities: Scope, Scale, and Trends

Nigeria: A Complex and Dynamic International Education Market

Independent schools

Universities

Table 4. Top 15 UK University Destinations for Nigerian Students
Institution	2018/19 Nigerian Students(%∆ vs 2014/15)	% of Institutions’ Total International Students
Coventry University	555 (↓ 49%)	4.63%
University of Hertfordshire	365 (↓ 34%)	8.02%
Robert Gordon University	340 (↓ 41%)	16.79%
University of Salford	270 (↓ 48%)	14.96%
Nottingham Trent University	225 (↓ 21%)	4.71%
University of Birmingham	215 (↓ 36%)	2.36%
Anglia Ruskin University	210 (↓ 36%)	5.93%
University of the West of England	210 (↓ 4%)	5.32%
University of Portsmouth	205 (↓ 40%)	4.58%
University of Northumbria	200 (↑ 54%)	4.88%
University of Aberdeen	195 (↓ 7%)	3.72%
University of Nottingham	190 (↓ 19%)	2.32%
De Montfort University	175 (↑ 25%)	3.31%
University of Leeds	175 (↓ 41%)	1.89%
University of Manchester	165 (↓ 47%)	1.14%
Source: UK Higher Education Statistics Agency, “Table 28—Non-UK HE Students by HE Provider and Country of Domicile: Academic Years 2014/15 to 2018/19,” accessed October 7, 2020, https://www.hesa.ac.uk/data-and-analysis/students/table-28.

Nigerian Government Scholarship Bodies: Enablers or Embezzlers?

Ghana: A Bonus Market of Bargain-Hunting Elites

Comparative Case Study: Libyan Elites and UK Schools

West African PEPs’ School Fees: A Possible Illicit Financial Flow

Predicate crimes other than tax evasion are also likely tainting funds used to pay the school fees of some West African PEPs. According to one political journalist interviewed for this paper:

Tuition Fees Dwarf Official Salaries

Table 7. UK Boarding School Fees Compared to Top Nigerian PEPs’ Annual Earnings
Year	Average Annual Fee	Annual Earnings of a Minister or State Governor
2020	£35,289 (N17.1 million)	£16,082 (N7.8 million)
2019	£34,695 (N16.8 million)	£16,846 (N7.8 million)
2018	£33,684 (N16.3 million)	£16,116 (N7.8 million)
2017	£32,259 (N12.3 million)	£20,526 (N7.8 million)
2016	£30,951 (N9.1 million)	£26,531 (N7.8 million)
2015	£30,369 (N8.7 million)	£27,273 (N7.8 million)
2014	£28,788 (N7.6 million)	£29,323 (N7.8 million)
2013	£27,612 (N7.0 million	£30,830 (N7.8 million)
2012	£26,340 (N6.6 million)	£30,952 (N7.8 million)
2011	£25,152 (N6.0 million)	£32,773 (N7.8 million)
University of Aberdeen	195 (↓ 7%)	3.72%
University of Nottingham	190 (↓ 19%)	2.32%
De Montfort University	175 (↑ 25%)	3.31%
University of Leeds	175 (↓ 41%)	1.89%
University of Manchester	165 (↓ 47%)	1.14%
Note: Between 2011 and 2020, a state governor’s earnings remained constant (N7.8 million) in naira terms but fluctuated in pound sterling terms depending on the exchange rate. Naira conversions calculated using GBP/NGN exchange rate as of January 1 of each year, accessed October 2, 2020, https://www.exchangerates.org.uk/. Sources: Data published in the Independent School Council’s Annual Census, 2011–2020, accessed October 2, 2020, https://www.isc.co.uk/research/annual-census/.

A Snapshot of West African PEPs’ Spending in the UK Education Sector

Understanding West African Elite Demand for a UK Education

Traditions and ties

In Their Own Words: Why I Attended UK Boarding School

Social distinction

In Their Own Words: Being Nigerian at a Top UK Boarding School

“I made friends for life and did not experience any discrimination. It was a great experience. I went on to attend university in the UK but I am now back in Nigeria working.”¹²³

Domestic shortcomings

These sentiments are widely shared and contributed to Nigerian families’ strong demand for international education opportunities.

Risk avoidance

Corruption Risks to the UK Education Sector

Money laundering. Money laundering is the process of concealing the origin, ownership, or destination of illicit funds by hiding it within legitimate economic ¹³⁸ Money launderers use a variety of investments, financial transactions, and corporate mechanisms to sanitize the proceeds of crime and corruption, including the purchase of property and luxury merchandise. As purveyors of high-end goods—a world-class education—UK schools and universities are attractive money laundering targets. Third-party payments present a particularly high money laundering risk to educational institutions, even if they originate from companies registered in the United Kingdom.¹³⁹ Money launderers and tax evaders frequently use such companies to spend the proceeds of crime.¹⁴⁰
Bribery. UK private schools and universities that allow third parties (generally, an entity that is not a close family member) to pay for a student’s fees could unwittingly be facilitating bribery. Payments made by anonymous corporate entities, friends of the family, or even individuals claiming to be distant relatives could be directed to PEPs in exchange for improperly influencing policy decisions or contract awards in another country. In 2019, the NCA warned that bribery conducted via the payment of school fees was increasing.¹⁴¹
Reputation laundering. Elite educational institutions also confer respectability on dubious individuals by accepting their children as students and their philanthropy in the form of donations.¹⁴² In the words of one UK law enforcement official, “Private schools don’t just legitimise your wealth, they also legitimise your children as well.”¹⁴³ Continuing demand for controversial “golden visas”—Tier 1 investor visas that grant UK residency to individuals investing at least £2 million in the country—is driven, at least in part, by wealthy emigres’ desire to educate their children at elite British schools.¹⁴⁴
Smurfing. Students may also be used—either knowingly or unwittingly—to engage in “smurfing”: a money laundering technique by which criminals or kleptocrats move illicit wealth through numerous transfers that are too small to draw the attention of banks.¹⁴⁵ The illicit funds can then be laundered by, for instance, purchasing luxury goods or paying for school fees. In 2019, UK authorities froze ninety-five UK bank accounts—many of which belonged to foreign students—that had been used to smurf £3.6 million.¹⁴⁶ Meanwhile, a UK bank recently alerted authorities about suspicious cash deposits of over £57 million linked to 600 student bank accounts.¹⁴⁷

Anticorruption Safeguards

Educational institutions’ AML policies

AML Policy Exemplar: Dulwich College

UK laws, regulations, and policies

Visa checks

Know Your Customer protocols

Suspicious Activity Reports

Conclusions

Scores of West African PEPs’ children attend—or have recently graduated from—UK private boarding schools and universities. In at least six recent instances, a UK school or university admitted the child of a West African PEP that had been convicted of corruption-related crimes or had their assets seized by UK courts. Among Nigerian political elites, in particular, demand for places at UK private boarding schools and universities remains high. Enduring cultural and sociological factors underpin this demand; schooling in the United Kingdom is a proven social distinction strategy by which Nigerian elites obtain and protect their status.
Many West African PEPs pay UK school and university fees using unexplained wealth. Rapidly increasing fees, spiraling living costs, declining currency values, and stagnating salaries have made it increasingly difficult for even senior government officials to afford UK tuition fees. While many Nigerian PEPs, for example, claim they accumulated immense wealth before entering politics, very few would be able to show convincing evidence of how they did so. Indeed, other than family savings or their spouse’s salary, most civil servants and career politicians have no legitimate source of income beyond their official salary and allowances.
British schools and universities’ increasing awareness of corruption risks is necessary—but not sufficient—to forestall illicit financial flows through the UK education sector. UK schools and universities still appear reluctant to acknowledge outside criticism of the sector’s AML shortcomings or to derive lessons learned from recent anticorruption failures. Some have strengthened AML protocols and involved outside experts to conduct enhanced due diligence. Such positive developments are, however, overshadowed by educational institutions’ failure to file more than a handful of SARs each year as well as their continued willingness to matriculate students linked to known—and even convicted—kleptocrats.
UK government policies and programs seeking to boost the country’s international education sector lack a much-needed anticorruption component. Including modest AML safeguards into the UK’s International Education Strategy would not dilute its effectiveness as a blueprint for increasing education export revenues. Doing so would, however, help government and education sector stakeholders to better tailor their marketing approaches to high-risk jurisdictions like Nigeria. Over the long term, this would reduce the sector’s vulnerability to illicit financial flows.
Educational institutions in Canada, the United States, and other countries that recruit elite students from West Africa are exposing themselves to the same corruption risks as their UK counterparts. While UK private boarding schools and universities continue to be the destination of choice for the children of these PEPs, illicit financial flows from the region to boarding schools and universities in the United States, Canada, Ireland, and Australia likely will increase over the coming decade. This continued expansion of the international education market will present new anticorruption challenges for policymakers in those countries.

Policy Implications and Recommendations

Clarify responsibilities. Legislators should update UK money laundering rules to clarify the AML responsibilities of education institutions and specify situations in which they must submit SARs to the NCA. Revised legislation should also task educational sector professional bodies with self-regulation under the auspices of the Financial Conduct Authority’s OPBAS.
Strengthen gatekeepers. The UK government should review internal procedures surrounding—and the rationale behind—quick-turnaround visa issuance in high-risk corruption jurisdictions like Nigeria. UKVI should embrace its anticorruption gatekeeper role by incorporating basic AML checks into visa issuance guidance. When seeking proof of whether student visa applicants have sufficient funds to pay their tuition fees, UKVI should scrutinize the source of those funds, liaising with anticorruption and other law enforcement agencies as necessary. UKVI should also require schools and universities to have detailed AML policies in place before allowing them to sponsor student visas.
Train stakeholders. The DIT should provide AML training to the ministry’s Education Team and consider seconding an AML policy expert to it. This expert could advise the team and help it incorporate common-sense anticorruption safeguards into the UK international education marketing strategy. The UK government should also sensitize its Education Sector Advisory Group to its anticorruption concerns related to the sector.