Rejig EFCC, Mr President, By Dan Agbese

I wish to report that a few days ago, I navigated my way through the labyrinth of the national archive, the graveyard of brilliant, practical, and pragmatic solutions put forward by Nigerians on Nigerian problems in judicial and administrative commissions of enquiry, committees and panels expressly set up to respond to particular issues and challenges.

Take a breath.

The archive is not a pretty sight. It is an indictment of a nation lost in the wilderness of its own multifaceted but uncoordinated ambitions to join the Joneses of progressive and modern nations. The archive is a silent witness to the rise and fall of our nation and gives you some indication as to why leadership inertia and indifference have hobbled our human and naturally endowed nation and forced it to remain a potentially great nation. The shelves, hundreds of them, groan under the weight of these reports.

Here is one of them. In July 2020, the acting chairman of EFCC, Ibrahim Magu, was suspended by President Muhammadu Buhari. The president acted on a series of letters to him from the attorney-general of the federation and minister of justice, Abubakar Malami, SAN, in which he accused Magu of various acts of corruption, including his allegedly diverting billions of Naira of recovered funds and purchasing property in Dubai through a proxy.

Buhari suspended the acting chairman and appointed a judicial commission of enquiry to look into the allegations. The judicial commission of enquiry was intended to show the president meant business. It was chaired by Justice Ayo Salami, former president of the court of appeal and was given 45 days to complete its assignment and submit its report to the president. It was given a little more time. It eventually concluded its assignment and submitted its report in four boxes to the president on November 19, 2020.

When Buhari received the report, he said something that in my view, exposed the hollowness of his avowed anti-corruption crusade. I think he lost his baton in the anti-graft war before he left office last month. The war has invariably been won by corruption that keeps smirking at the commanders and the foot soldiers of the war against it.

Buhari said: “… the stark reality of widespread corruption becomes poignant when allegations of corruption touches (sic) on the leadership of an institution set up by law to coordinate and enforce all economic and financial crimes. It is an abomination that strikes at the root and undermines the government’s anti-corruption.”

The report has not seen the light of day. Buhari refused to release it. He ignored the right of the public to know what the commission found. Were the allegations against Magu true? The president who should have been the sole beneficiary of the work of the commission, chose to sit on it.

I thought he investigated Magu to enable him take action to invigorate the anti-corruption war. For two years, Magu stewed in the enveloping fear of being asked to tell a judge his own side of the story. He never was called upon to account for his alleged transgressions in a court of law as required by law. He was not retired from the police force. He was just ignored because, contrary to public expectations, Buhari did not intend to do anything about the Magu case and the findings of the judicial commission of enquiry.

In his indifference to the commission, its findings, and its recommendations, it probably never occurred to Buhari that he sabotaged the anti-graft war to which he staked his integrity as president. Remember that he came to “kill corruption before it kills Nigeria.” And he mocked the prosecution of the war and his commitment to and support for it. The Magu case was an opportunity for Buhari to clean up the system and re-invigorate it for a new phase of the long-running war. That he ignored himself and gave his own anti-corruption integrity a hollow ring is sad and sadder for the nation than you might think. The commission recommended that the president should appoint an acting chairman for two years, but Buhari ignored that and promptly appointed AbdulRasheed Bawa as substantive chairman of EFCC.

Buhari asked the senate twice to confirm Magu’s appointment and twice the senate rejected his request because a report on Magu from DSS showed that the man had soiled his hands as a senior police officer elsewhere and was considered the wrong man to head an anti-graft agency. Still, Buhari in defiance of the law and the rule of law, retained Magu in acting capacity for five years. He kept Magu and Magu threw the mud in his face.

Thanks to resourceful reporters, we knew that the commission found cases of monumental corruption under Magu’s watch. The commission under him was a suppurating sore of the nation. The commission told the nation what went on under Magu. More importantly, it found that the integrity of the commission has been compromised in several instances. It exposed agency that requires a radical shake up to return it to the path of integrity and public trust. The Magu case presents the president with the take off point.

This is made urgent by the fact that two weeks or so ago, President Bola Tinubu suspended Bawa to enable the government investigate allegations of corruption against him. The president’s surprise action points to the fact that EFCC has lost its moral authority and professional integrity and is stuck in the mud of rampant corruption and corrupt practices that are clearly not tributes to Buhari as the anti-corruption czar. Public institutions, like the fish, rot from the head. If the EFCC chairman is rotten, it is naïve to expect the operatives of the commission to be anything but thoroughly rotten.

It is a bad record that two successive chairmen of the commission have been laid up by the heel by venality and corruption. The president needs to undertake a radical and transformative restructuring of the commission to make a fundamental paradigm shift in the war and restore public confidence in its integrity and in the capacity of its chairman and operatives to clean up their battered image.

The commission is a one-man show in that the chairman enjoys unlimited powers. No public institution should be a one-man show in order to prevent the accumulation of power and its egregious abuse. It is in the nature of human beings that those who wield power absolutely tend to abuse it absolutely. It was not strange that the Salami commission found that Magu abused those powers in solely a) deciding the cases to prosecute or not and in b) choosing not to be honest in record keeping as to what the commission seized from convicts, including huge sums of money.

Note this: “The commission observed from its findings that prosecutorial and decisions by Ibrahim Magu on case files were based on his personal whims, as against the law and the facts. The commission also notes the prevalence of widespread corruption, abuse of power and pervasive impunity in the running of the EFCC. Between 2016 and 2019, 14 procurement fraud cases involving N117,972,209,035 and $309,151,419 were abandoned under Magu’s watch.”

He also “abandoned multi-million dollar fraud cases involving high-profile individuals…”

As the Ibo man likes to say, chei.

The commission is an outpost of the Nigeria police. The Salami commission found there were 970 policemen, 114 drivers, 641 mobile policemen and 215 operators in addition to the core staff of the commission. The commission has clearly become over-staffed and unwieldy. Salami pointed out that the past four successive chairmen of the commission were all police officers. He recommended that in appointing a new chairman for the commission, “consideration should be given to candidates from other law enforcement or security agencies and core staff of EFCC…”

It makes sense. The Nigeria Police Force is one of the least trusted public institutions in the land. Evidence of malfeasance in the commission is evidence that its personnel seconded to the commission came without washing their soiled hands. It was once suggested that the commission be headed by a retired justice of the court of appeal and the man designated as chairman in the current structure be given a different title. It is worth considering by the president. Why is there no aboard to which the chairman is primarily responsible?

Too many things are wrong with the EFCC structure as it stands. These have not only hobbled its effectiveness but created room for the commission to be used as an attack dog to intimidate political enemies, real and imagined. The late Chief Justice of Nigeria, Ibrahim Kutigi, once advised the commission to prosecute on the basis of evidence rather than the current practice of prosecuting on the basis of investigation.

I am sure that if a retired jurist heads the commission, he will not allow the commission to go to court with inconclusive investigation only to engage in a fishing expedition in the court. The president must re-appraise the prosecution of the anti-graft war. The war is frayed at the edges. It has lost its steam. As we have seen, corruption has fought back and fought hard to defeat the commission. This is not the time for cosmetics. We either commit as a nation to doing a determined and honest battle with corruption or formally accept it as our way of life. A nation must be known for something. But we must choose to be known for corruption. It is a bad choice.

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