With Nicolas Sarkozy going down for five years in prison for criminal association tied to illegal campaign funding from Muammar Gaddafi’s Libya, the spectre of Africa’s unusual post-colonial influence on French and thus European affairs has risen from the grave again.
In a dramatic conclusion to an 11-year legal process that stunned the French electorate, on 25 September, Sarkozy, the first outsider to attain the presidency without being a product of the exclusive Ecole Nationale d’Administration, which the France24 news channel calls “the well-worn production line for future French leaders”, has gone to prison. He defiantly said he would appeal the sentence, but under French law, his appeal will be heard from behind bars.
Sarkozy’s remarkable rise to the Elysée Palace in 2007 rocked the old bureaucratic and political establishment – and he became a darling of the right for his hard line on immigration and security, and his celebration of national identity (strangely, as he is the son of a Hungarian immigrant). But how he got to the Elysée fell under scrutiny, especially after he failed to secure a second term in 2012.
It turns out that two of his old friends, Brice Hortefeux and Claude Guéant (both also sentenced to imprisonment), had asked an oil-wealth-flush Gaddafi for campaign funding for Sarkozy’s 2007 election – and had been given an estimated €50-million in cash. Astonishingly, the middleman in the deal was Abdullah Senussi, the convicted mastermind behind the 1989 bombing over Niger of UTA Flight 772 which killed all 170 aboard including 54 French citizens.
Sarkozy was acquitted of charges of corruption, embezzlement, and of illegal funding of his presidential campaign – but the money secured by his mates in fact followed in the footsteps of a long-established and secret relationship between Africa and Europe that reverses the conventional view of African presidents being corrupted by neo-colonial European powers.
This is the shadowy phenomenon of la valise, “the suitcase” system of millions in cash francs sent over decades by African dictators to corrupt the French political process. And the man at the heart of the system is Robert Bourgi, a colourful Shi‘ite Lebanese born in Senegal who became Sarkozy’s unofficial adviser on Africa, and who was awarded the Legion d’honneur, France’s highest civilian honour,by Sarkozy in 2007.
Post-colonial France: the “Suitcase Republic”
To explain this, I am going to take a dive into my archives: the Center for French and Francophone Studies at Duke University in North Carolina hosted a debate that I attended on la valise on 5 October 2011, just after Bourgi had spilled the beans, and this article largely comprises some extracts from that debate.
Philippe Bernard, the outgoing Le Monde correspondent for Africa, initiated the debate by noting that Bourgi had in September 2011 accused former socialist President Jacques Chirac and his Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin, who were in power from 1995-2007, of having received enormous bribes.
These were delivered in suitcases stuffed with cash, Bourgi stated, from five West and Central African states – the Congo, Burkina Faso, Senegal, Ivory Coast, and Gabon – to fund Chirac’s campaign. In a later interview with Canal+, Bourgi claimed that the 1988 campaign of far-right candidate Jean-Marie le Pen of the National Front, had also been partly funded by la valise.
According to The Telegraph’s retelling of the tale, Bourgi claimed in an interview with Le Journal du Dimanche that he had personally “transported ‘tens of millions of francs’ each year, with the amounts going up in the run-up to French presidential elections – an intimation the cash was used to fund Mr Chirac’s political campaigns. ‘I saw Chirac and Villepin count the money in front of me,’ he said.”
Chirac and de Villepin have denied Bourgi’s claims.
“He alleged he regularly passed on bank notes from five African presidents: Abdoulaye Wade of Senegal [in power 2000-2012]; Blaise Campaoré of Burkina Faso [1987-2014]; Laurent Gbagbo of Ivory Coast [2000-2011]; Denis Sassou Nguesso of the Congo [1997- today] and Omar Bongo of Gabon [1967-2009], whom Mr Bourgi called ‘Papa’.
“Together, he alleged they contributed £6.2-million to Mr Chirac’s successful 2002 presidential campaign. A sixth leader, President Obiang N’Guema of Equatorial Guinea [1979-today] allegedly was the last member to join the cash donor club,” until, Bourgi claimed, a nervous de Villepin brought the system to a halt in 2005 – though the Sarkozy trial clearly suggests it had in fact continued.
Bourgi claimed he had personally run the valise system for 25 years, and in exchange, the African dictators were granted huge reductions in their debt to France once their sponsored candidate attained office in the Elysée. A Sarkozy loyalist whose memoir, They Know I Know Everything, was published a year ago, Bourgi has refused to implicate Sarkozy, however.
Bernard said he believed the system had arisen out of the notion of “France-Afrique, the confusion of French and African interests. It has been a public secret since [African] liberation in the 1960s: in 1960/61, deals were signed that France will use its power to defend the [African] regimes and France will have exclusive access to African raw materials and the right of France to intervene militarily in case of threats to African national security”.
“In the 1980s, the Gaullists,” then in opposition against François Mitterand’s Socialist government, “were similarly accused – that a percentage of Gabonese oil revenues were allegedly used to finance their campaigns – but proof and public testimony was lacking.”
Professor Stephen Smith, former Africa editor of Libération, and Bernard’s predecessor at Le Monde, recalled rumours that “money smuggled in by Africans to the French Prime Minister’s office in djembe drums. The office has no air-conditioning, so the thought of him standing there with his sleeves rolled up counting it all is amusing.”
On a serious note, however, Smith recalled that in 1971, at the very start of a reign that only ended in 1993, it was said that the first President of Ivory Coast, Félix Houphouët-Boigny, had donated “bags of money” to the conservative Georges Pompidou government.
There was, Smith said, “a long continuity of the practice from the Gaullists [Charles de Gaulle was in power 1959-1969] to [the rightist Republican Valéry] Giscard d’Estaing [1974-1981], a continuity of conservative governments,” who had been propped up by la valise: “This amounts to a post-colonial ‘informal state,’ not on paper, but in practice.”
Remember that this period – the Fifth French Republic – was brought into being by the crisis in France precipitated by the Algerian Liberation War.
So we have half a century of African dictators, installed and propped up by French military power, who in turn propped up with African oil and other revenue, a string of conservative sister regimes in France. Yet Smith said that the valise system in the six countries also operated via French companies working in parallel in the former colonies: one paid the French conservative Gaullists; the other paid the French socialists and communists.
Given France’s strategic position within Europe, its influence only matched by Germany and Britain, anyone able to buy the French presidency in effect purchases huge influence in Europe itself – so progressive politics on both continents appear to have been bedeviled by these secret transactions.
Smith said that his first newspaper scoop on the secret practice regarding the shadowy character of Bourgi, was in 1995 for Libération when he wrote about the unprocedural write-off of Zaïrean dictator Mobutu Sese Seko’s debts: Mobutu “raised his little staff and I was afraid he would hit me! Robert Bourgi earned €600,000 from Mobutu to put out the fire – and he earned €1-million to stop a book that I was writing”.
Bourgi’s “accounting is pristine; he deals only in cash, so there is little to prove”. The bribe money was later deposited in South African or Lebanese bank accounts, Smith claimed. The reach of Bourgi’s unofficial power was considerable: Smith claimed that when Sarkozy wanted a rare photo-opportunity with South Africa’s then-reclusive and elderly Nelson Mandela, Bourgi simply phoned up “Papa”, Gabonese President Omar Bongo, who persuaded the old man to agree to fly to Paris for the meeting in 2007.
The Suitcase System expands
Prof Achille Mbembe, a Cameroonian specialist in post-colonial Africa now based at WISER at Wits, responded that the valise system was one of “mutual corruption” that has “shackled France and Africa for decades”: “The relationship is not only corrupt in terms of money… It’s a deeper form of cultural corruption that has emasculated somewhat African civil societies. In terms of the future, France still has military bases in Africa and can kick out a Gbagbo. But when France has to pay a heavy price [for intervention], it will think twice.”
And that has, of course, occurred with the recent rash of militarist coups d’etat of varied intensity across the Sahel, most of it in former French Africa: Chad, Mali, Guinea, and Sudan in 2021, Burkina Faso in 2022, then Niger and Gabon in 2023.
Bernard said that as France’s grip on the African continent started to be eclipsed militarily (by the USA, Russia, and others), in terms of the Francophone African CFA currency which, though linked to the Euro, is on its way out, in terms of French companies losing their exclusive relationships with African regimes as the International Monetary Fund took the reins in many countries, and as Chinese, Brazilian, and Indian investment poured into the continent, Sarkozy wanted the “network of go-betweens” such as Bourgi, who had “operated as a parallel diplomat,” to end.
Smith agreed that France by then made more money from its relations with Anglophone Africa – South Africa and Kenya in particular – than it did from its former colonies, but warned that “now you’ve got a multiplication of the French exceptionalist models: China’s Africa relationship is as corrupt as the French; the French preserve and privilege has now become globalised.”
Mbembe added that in his view, the waning of the French star in Africa – despite French remaining a dominant African language, and despite the existence of an African Diaspora literati in France – was that France itself had “entered a process of re-provincialising”, of monocultural conservatism, and retreat from world affairs.
Mbembe said that “Robert Bourgi’s ‘revelations’ weren’t revelations in Africa. In Francophone Africa, this hasn’t been perceived as a scandal” because the prevailing cynicism about Franco-African relations was underscored by a long-term trend of the decline of the importance of France to its former colonies.
“Geography is no longer centred on Paris… Robert Bourgi and others are the last spasms of a dead proposition, something that is on its knees, no longer historical but anecdotal… France will become a parenthesis.”
But it is very far from clear whether the valise system had indeed come to an end and lost its ability to shape African and European politics. Smith suggested that Sarkozy had in fact not ended the system as he had written off 40% of the debts of Congo and of Gabon – whereas Chirac had capped the write-offs at only 8%, so suspected payments to Sarkozy would have been “a good investment by African leaders”.
If Sarkozy was also involved, and the Libyan affair certainly suggests so, then Bourgi’s end-game in speaking out about the valise system after 25 years – and claiming it ended with Chirac – was clearly not aimed at tarnishing Chirac, who was a dying man and a spent political force, but possibly rather to force Sarkozy while he was president to allow Bourgi to retire smoothly, without fear of prosecution, then aged 67, to his newly purchased mansion in Corsica.
Smith said the roots of the system lay in the fact that “when Europeans came to Africa, they ‘unbuttoned’ themselves”, initiating the corrupt relationship. But it takes two to tango, so what of the agency of African leaders themselves?
“If I was an African leader today,” Smith admitted, “I’d still ‘invest’ in France because the United Nations, IMF, etc will turn to France when they need assistance in Africa – despite it having lost leverage as a one-stop centre – so African leaders’ choices will still count.”
It seems clear that despite Sarkozy’s cautionary imprisonment, the suitcase system will continue in one form or another, although likely spreading to include several newly invested powers – the USA, China, Brazil, India, and South Africa.
Ironically, with average continental GDP growth at 3.5%, though peripheral, Africa’s ability to influence and corrupt political affairs in the metropole may well even increase.
[Image: By World Economic Forum – Flickr: Nicolas Sarkozy – World Economic Forum Annual Meeting 2011, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=16772723]
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR.
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