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After a successful transition to democratic rule in 1999, Nigeria launched a high-profile campaign aimed at securing the repatriation of looted public funds being held in foreign banks. This campaign was championed by President Olusegun Obasanjo, a long-standing critic of corrupt military regimes and co-founder of the global anti-corruption NGO Transparency International, throughout his eight-year tenure. By the time Obasanjo left office in May 2007, he had secured the recovery of approximately 2 billion USD in assets and triggered some vital international initiatives against money laundering. However, his efforts were hampered by a combination of local and external obstacles. Externally, the campaign was marked by the absence of sufficient international political will. While at the domestic level, it was undermined by a lack of transparency, the excessive fixation with the Abacha loot, inadequate legal and accounting skills, the uncooperative attitude of accused persons and limited domestic political will. This paper illustrates how these issues have combined to frustrate moves to recover Nigeria's stolen billions sitting in the West.

For many Nigerians, and indeed in the eyes of most foreign observers of Nigerian affairs, the restoration of democratic rule in Africa's largest country in May 1999 has brought little or no change in the politics of this vast nation of 150-million people. Corruption, electoral malpractice and political violence, the usual causes of governmental instability, have remained intractable despite a deluge of reform initiatives. Yet, as this article will show, while the benefits of most institutional reforms have been difficult to measure, there has been significant progress in a few other key areas of national political life. One of them is the relatively successful reform of the judiciary, which has led to the institution's gradual emergence as a courageous and impartial arbiter in intra-elite electoral disputes in this chronically unstable federation. The transformation of the judiciary is amply demonstrated by the large number of judicial pronouncements that have upturned the results of several flawed elections and restored to office elected officials, such as state governors, wrongfully removed from their positions. This article argues that these decisions and the new activist role of the judiciary which produced them have, in many ways, helped to reinforce the role of the judiciary as a vital instrument of political control and democratic stabilisation and by so doing have helped to prolong the life of Nigeria's Fourth Republic.1 The author acknowledges the generous funding provided by Tracking Development Project for this study, which was undertaken in October-December 2009, as well as the invaluable suggestions and comments of both the anonymous reviewer and Drs Akinyinka Akinyoade and Jan Kees van Donge of the African Studies Centre, University of Leiden, The Netherlands. Special thanks also go to Mr Sola Fasure and all the library staff of The Nation Newspapers (Lagos) for providing the author with access to their newspaper cuttings and other materials.

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