EDITORIAL: EFCC: Physician, heal thy self

In a move that seemed like adherence to the Holy Writ’s injunction on self-rediscovery – “Physician, heal thy self,” the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission dismissed 27 of its operatives in 2024 for being entwined with fraudulent activities. Though an embarrassment, it was nevertheless good riddance to bad rubbish.

Such incongruous ethical manifestation in the agency that personifies Nigeria’s moral authority or force is a toxin that should not be taken lightly. Its existence is like a fallacy in the foundation of logic. Bewilderingly, since the case of the 27 operatives became public knowledge in January, similar anomalies have occurred in quick successions. In its Lagos Zonal Command, some EFCC officers reportedly broke into the exhibit room and stole foreign currencies, jewellery, and gold bars, for which 10 operatives were rounded up for questioning.

The same sour tale spilled out of its Kaduna office on 25 January, where an official, simply identified as Polycarp, made away with $30,000 and other items of probative value. The suspect was said to have fled as soon as the agency was about to carry out an audit. These oddities underline the fact that the EFCC chairman, Olu Olukoyede, might have before him a cesspit to clear out. Cleaning these Augean Stables thoroughly is of absolute necessity to put the EFCC on firm ground towards realising its objective of containing corruption in the country.

Perhaps, with the benefit of hindsight, having been part of the system, the EFCC boss demanded from all the personnel to be like Caesar’s wife when he held the first meeting with senior officials in October 2023, shortly after assuming office. Then he had urged the staff that, “We must live above board by setting the pace with good examples. As anti-corruption fighters, our hands must be clean; so, we have to declare our assets.”

However, assets declaration, as the Nigerian experience shows, doesn’t help much in the anti-graft war, given the mess that state governors, lawmakers and senior bureaucrats have made of this public accountability imperative. Corrupt elements have ways of hiding their ill-gotten wealth. They are not encapsulated in any official document even after their tenure had expired.

Having fished out these bad eggs in the system, the EFCC should subject them to the due process of the law. This has been done in time past, evident in the 2012 prosecution of two of its officials who were subsequently sentenced to five-year jail terms each, for conspiracy and obtaining money by false pretence. The equality of all before the law is one canon of democracy that should be adhered to at all times.

Tampering with evidence or exhibits in custody is a subtle way of killing cases they are tied to. Therefore, moving ahead to prosecute the affected cases, therefore, is to embark on a voyage that leads to nowhere. In critical terms, many times fraudulent operatives are alleged to have acted in cahoots with suspects undergoing trial. As such, Premium Times calls on Olukoyede to publicly put these knaves on trial, to act as deterrence to others, just as it would help in restoring the waning public confidence in the anti-corruption campaign.

The EFCC chairman’s avowal to resign if he did not complete the investigation, let alone prosecute a certain ex-governor, or his lamentation that, “If you see some case files you will weep” are indicative of his passion or unflinching commitment to the job. His one-year scorecard as of last October, revealed 3,455 convictions across board. Also, N248.7 billion, $105.4 million and hundreds of euros and pounds were recovered.

But are these enough? We don’t think so, with the earth-shaking lootings of the public treasury and discoveries that had gone on before his assumption of office. Sadly, it is a never-ending miasma on his watch. There was a trending video of $400,000 purportedly collected by one of the Commission’s sectional heads, allegedly from “a yet-to be-identified supposed (member of) staff,” which the EFCC noted in January and vowed to investigate. A public update on how this has gone is necessary.

Admittedly, synergy is required for its effective operations. All should be summoned, therefore, to work on the winnowing process at the Commission for this to be total. It may well be that some of the cases the agency lost in court in the past were as a result of compromises at the level of investigation by the wolves in sheep’s clothing there. This is why the recruitment of operatives should be more rigorous to avoid the EFCC turning out like the Nigeria Police Force, where armed robbers are routinely recruited into the organisation. Then President Olusegun Obasanjo had released this bombshell in 2004.

A former Inspector-General of Police, Musiliu Smith, as the chairman of Police Service Commission (PSC), corroborated this in 2022, stating that, “There have been cases of robbers finding their way into recruitment camps.” Cases abound of police men selling arms to thieves or taking part in their operations. Some military personnel also dabble into this aberrant sale of arms to men of the underworld.

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Therefore, in a sense, it can be argued that these tainted EFCC operatives were people of questionable integrity ab initio, who simply got into the agency to use it as a platform to perpetuate their already accustomed criminal tendencies.

While Olukoyede wants his officials to be above board, we implore him too, to be conscious of the banana peels in the Commission, in view of the removal of some of his predecessors in circumstances that allegedly bordered on the abuse of office. In 2020, the Muhammadu Buhari regime removed Ibrahim Magu as EFCC chairman and set up a presidential panel headed by retired Justice Ayo Salami to investigate him.

The modalities for the sale of seized or forfeited assets to the Federal Government have equally been anything but accountable and transparent since inception. This is intolerable and we expect a rooting out of such malfeasance in the Commission.

As old and newer manifestations of corruption conflate to make the EFCC chairman’s job one of the most delicate and challenging, the focus of watchdogs both within and outside our shores should be on Olukoyede’s performance with the ongoing high-profile trials in the Commission. Last month, the agency reopened the case files of 13 former governors, with allegations of their looting of N772 billion.

There are additional new cases of ex-governors being prosecuted, including Abdelfattah Ahmed, Willie Obiano, Darius Ishaku and Yahaya Bello of Kwara, Anambra, Taraba and Kogi states respectively. There is also the ongoing case of the former governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria, Godwin Emefiele, and the 753 duplexes in Abuja, which is ranked “as the single largest asset recovery by the EFCC.”

To convict a politically exposed person in the country is a hard nut to crack for the EFCC. The only two former governors its mesh caught in this regard – Joshua Dariye and John Nyame – in 2022, were set free and ill-advisedly pardoned by the Buhari administration. Dealing effectively with the oxymoronic situation of fishing out the Judas’ in the system and these eye-popping cases will, ultimately, define Olukoyede’s tenure.