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There is no doubt that corruption is an immoral and a criminal phenomenon of many forms. It has negative effects on various walks of life. Illicit financial flows are one of its forms. Those flows may be a part of an illegal act or the product of an illegal works, or used for an illegal purpose, to adversely affect economic development in several aspects. They arise in settings affected by conflict, lack of democracy and good governance, and the absence of regulatory institutions. Although estimates of illicit financial flows in Africa differ, at the lowest point they exceed tens of billions of dollars annually. According to some estimates, it is roughly equal to the volume of foreign aid and investment flowing into the continent. Its most prominent determinants were debt, political risks, corruption, conflicts, fraudulent billing and profit transfer, human trafficking, drugs and weapons. Illegal practices in the business operations of multinational companies are responsible for more than half of those flows, followed by criminal activities, then bribery and embezzlement. These illegal flows in the African continent represents an annual increase higher than the global average, with a high degree of stability, to increase in wealth-rich countries affected by conflict, with their concentration in the region of the West, the North, and the South respectively, and with the increase in their flow abroad from the interior. Its behavior was also against the expectations of economic theory; as there was a positive relationship between the increase in economic growth rates in the African continent in the last two decades, and the growth rates of illicit financial flows. A waste of additional growth rates on African countries can be avoided, had these funds been invested locally. It would have been sufficient to fund the first ten-year plan for Agenda 2063. MPL caused an increase in the financial deficit on the continent. Most African countries have failed to fight corruption, especially those illicit financial flows, which reached its peak in the second decade of the twenty-first century, despite the fact that most countries on the African continent declared war on it, until a few African countries topped the Corruption Perceptions Index according to its recent publications. This failure is due to weak or absent organizational structures, lack of funding, low technical capabilities, poor regional coordination, and the involvement of senior officials and international companies
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