20 Years of EFCC, Abysmal CPI rating, trillions wasted: Time to Scrap EFCC, redirect resources
By John Alao
Lagos
Nigeria returned to a democratic rule in 1999, ushering in a new dawn of crusade and efforts against corruption in Nigeria.
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Corruption has made it extremely impossible for citizens to reap the dividends of democracy: benefit from the abundant resources of the nation and improve their general well-being and standard of living.
This renewed fight against corruption gave birth to the establishment of EFCC act of 2004, ICPC , CCB and other related agencies.
The Transparency Internationally is a non- profit, non- governmental , global civil society organization leading fights against corruption to create change towards a world free of corruption and to take action to combat global corruption with the civil societies’ anti- corruption measures.
The organization developed the corruption perception index in 1995 to rank nations in the prevalence of corruption within each country based on surveys and it had done that consistently giving a global picture of the level of corruption in the countries surveyed.
In 1997, before the EFCC was established, Nigeria was ranked 52 among the least corrupt nations out of the 175 countries by the transparency international. The EFCC was established in 2004 , making it 20 years of operation in Nigeria and the current report of the Transparency International shows Nigeria now ranks 145 out of 180 scoring 24 points of 100 , making the country the second most corrupt country in sub-Saharan Africa coming below countries like Cape Verde , Botswana, Rwanda, Mauritius, Namibia, Ghana and Benin Republic which scored 30, 39, 49, 55, 59, 70 and 70 respectively.
An abysmal performance and rating for a country referred to as giant of Africa with many agencies saddled with the responsibilities of fighting financial crimes and corruption.
Between the year 2010 to 2015, the EFCC had a total of 36,442 petitions , investigated 15, 124 (45%) , prosecuted 2, 460 ( 6.7%) , convicted 568 (3.75%) , transfered 8,856 to sister agencies and rejected 7,399. This is a very low performance from the EFCC judging by the amount of resources channelled every year to the agency and this unimpressive performance buttress the assumption in many quarters that EFCC has failed in it’s objectives and therefore , the Federal Government must rise to the occasion to save the nation from this embarrassment , scrapping the agency and redirecting the resources to other sectors of the economy.
This also shows that the beast of corruption has become untamed in Nigeria despite the songs of thousands of convictions sung by EFCC for twenty years; humongous budget presented, defended and voted for the agency. In the last five years, a total of #202.6 billion naira had been voted as budget for EFCC .
The executive arm of government had continued to provide finances and resources and the National Assembly had always passed all budgets presented by the agency and seen the abysmal reports by the Transparency International showing negligible and unacceptable variance in index of improvement yearly where we now rank among the most corrupt countries in the world.
In the 20 years of EFCC establishment, we have witnessed low performance in terms of petitions received, petitions investigated cases prosecuted and convicted and the statistics are in the public domain. We have witnessed the former Prime Minister of England referring to Nigeria as fantastically corrupt. Some Nigerians all over the world had been rejected by other countries after being tagged as citizens of a most corrupt nation. What then are the achievements of EFCC?
What is worrisome is the increasing budget of the EFCC coming from 22.7billion in the year 2019 to 78.6billion in 2024 in the face of abysmal anti-corruption performance and rating by the Transparency International.
The call, therefore, for the unbundling, restructuring and possibly scrapping of the EFCC is justified by those championing the cause. These humongous monies being channelled to the agency every year with absolutely depressing and catastrophic performance could have been diverted to other parts of the economy for the benefits of the citizens.
The EFCC had recently being weighed by many well-meaning Nigerians on the scale of legality of establishment, morality of operations and modus operandi, regarding investigations, prosecutions and convictions and the agency has been found grossly wanting.
There have been allegations of blackmail, corrupt practices and shady dealings against the agency and every day, Nigerians are being greeted with embarrassing allegations against the agency which we are now constrained to believe that the scrapping of the agency is long overdue.
I believe with all the facts laid bare by many against the agency, that truly, for an agency to have operated for over 20 years having been fully backed by the executive, judiciary and legislative arms of Government to carry out its operations, to have performed abysmally low, depressing and embarrassing TI rating, and enmeshed in allegations of blackmail, illegality and immorality, it is now time for a complete overhaul of the outfit.
We call on the President Bola Ahmed Tinubu and the Senate President, Senator Godswill Akpabio to, therefore, heed this clarion call by Nigerians to commence the process of restructuring the EFCC before it brings further embarrassment to the nation.
