David Cameron: calls Nigeria fantastically corrupt

President Muhammadu Buhari should read this before jumping on his presidential jet for the journey to London. He may shelve the trip and if he insists on going, he may not shake hands with Prime Minister, David Cameron.

His host,  Cameron has  demonstrated no iota of regard for him and his country Nigeria, dubbing it a ‘fantastically corrupt country’.

Cameron was caught on camera giving this description of Nigeria and Afghanistan when he met  Queen Elizabeth during a ceremony to mark her 90th birthday.

The anti-corruption summit is scheduled to hold in Lancaster House on Thursday.

The summit aimed at stepping up global action to combat corruption in all walks of life, without Britain itself shutting down  British Virgin Islands, Cayman Islands,  nests for  corrupt and criminal gangs,  where they  stash stolen money,  using shell companies to cover their trails.

President Buhari meets Queen Elizabeth II

In a pooled video feed made available to the ITN broadcaster, Cameron was shown talking with the queen about the summit.

“We had a very successful cabinet meeting this morning, talking about our anti-corruption summit,” Cameron said when the queen approached.

“We have got the Nigerians – actually we have got some leaders of some fantastically corrupt countries coming to Britain.”

Cameron went on: “Nigeria and Afghanistan – possibly two of the most corrupt countries in the world.”

The queen did not respond to Cameron’s comment.

But the Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby defended Nigeria’s leader, Muhammadu Buhari: “But this particular president is actually not corrupt.”

Cameron appeared  to be fixated with the old idea of a corrupt Nigeria in his brain as the two leaders he was ridiculing,  Afghan President Ashraf Ghani, and Buhari , acknowledge corruption in their countries and have pledged to clean it up.

Afghanistan is at number 166, second-from-bottom, in campaign group Transparency International’s latest Corruption Perceptions Index, an annual ranking of countries.

Only North Korea and Somalia, jointly ranked at number 167, are perceived to be more corrupt. Nigeria is at number 136 in the index.

It was not clear whether Cameron realised he was being filmed and recorded at the event at Buckingham Palace.

After Cameron’s remarks about Nigeria and Afghanistan, John Bercow, the speaker of parliament’s House of Commons joked: “They are coming at their own expense one assumes?”

“Everything has to be open,” Cameron said. “There are no sort of closed-door sessions. Everything has to be in front of the press. It’s going to be…It could be quite interesting.”

Cameron’s Downing Street office said both Buhari and Ghani acknowledged they faced a challenge to tackle corruption and they had been invited to the summit because they were leading the fight against graft.

“In a collection of essays on the fight against corruption to be published on the day of the Summit, President Ghani writes that Afghanistan is ‘one of the most corrupt countries on earth’,” a spokeswoman for Cameron said.

“President Buhari writes that corruption became a ‘way of life’ in his country under ‘supposedly accountable democratic governments’.”

When asked about the comments, Downing Street did not immediately respond.

*With Reuters report