EFCC vs 16 Governors: The supreme court must save the Nation, give justice and not judgement
This opinion is motivated by three inter-related developments: the first is the recent uproar and media embarrassment caused by several corruption allegations against the EFCC where some citizens have levied several allegations against the agency top officials.
The corruption allegations against this agency of the government coupled with other allegations of violence, flagrant disregard of rule of law, lack of respect for citizens’ freedom and rights as enshrined in the constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria ( as amended) and some more issues which is causing the Nation a global embarrassment, having lingered for years unstopped and unabated has constrained Nigerians to strongly believe it’s high time the EFCC is scrapped.
The second impetus is current case ongoing at the supreme court where many learned Nigerians and notable elites have pointed out that the EFCC Was founded on illegalities quoting the portion of the constitution that showed clearly that the agency did not fulfill the requirements of the constitution before the act is enacted having not met the ratification of the Majority of the House of Assembly.
The Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) has therefore failed the requisite legality and integrity test. This development has triggered media uproar by well meaning Nigerians who strongly feel illegality cannot challenge legality as he who must come to equity must come with clean hands and a Nation like Nigeria should not be enmeshed in such global embarrassment.
The third is the score card of the EFCC in the twenty years of operation on this country since the enactment of her acts where Nigeria now currently sit 145 of 180 on the Transparency International rating and regarded as the second most corrupt country in sub Saharan Africa having scored 24 points of 100 coming way below countries like Ghana, Namibia, Etc . Trillions of naira had been voted into EFCC since it’s creation and what we now have is an abysmal performance and shambolic rating among the comity of countries in the continent.
This is a strong reason why Nigerians have all agreed that EFCC should be unbundled and scrapped completely. I believe that rather than to continue voting billions to EFCC who is currently asking for a 76billion budget, the supreme court whose members have been victims of EFCC brutality should do the country a great service to give justice and not judgement and the National Assembly should ask itself the more relevant question of whether the EFCC act fulfilled the constitutional provisions , is succeeding or not in the fight against corruption or whether it is exacerbating the problem of corruption by undermining, through its style, the evolution of institution- driven methods of fighting the ailment.
At this stage I believe it will be important to come state : I have never been a fan of the EFCC. In fact, I read a feature in the blog Nigeria Village Square (www.nigeriavillagesquare.com) on January 8 2009 entitled, “War on Corruption: Why EFCC Will Fail”, I also read : “A major reason why the EFCC is likely to fail is that it is using exactly the same strategies employed by previous regimes and agencies – treating corruption as a moral lapse rather than a systemic problem.” I was impressed to read and discover that “corruption is a systemic problem, which is tied to the success or failure of the nation-building project, the level of poverty in the land, and the extent to which citizens believe they are valued as stakeholders in the state.
Therefore fighting the corruption by a segment of the society for an ill that is generalized and expressed in different forms is unlikely to solve the problem of corruption.” I have over the years read several other articles critical of the EFCC. From about 2012 I began calling for the granting of conditional amnesty against all accused of corruption because I felt the whole ‘war’ was a charade that had not achieved its aim. In fact EFCC’s ‘gra-gra’ method compounds the blurring of the boundary between the supposed fight against corruption and political vendetta.
Now I am convinced beyond reasonable doubts that the agency should be scrapped completely.
Another reason why I have not been a fan of the EFCC and its methods is that there is nothing to suggest that it is succeeding in the fight against corruption – despite its ‘gra-gra’.
Methodologically, the best way of assessing the impact of the EFCC in the fight against corruption is to use the ‘before’ and ‘after’ benchmarks – that is, to pose the question: what was the situation before the EFCC was set up and what is the situation now? Procedural issues like how much money it succeeded in confiscating or the number of convictions it secured are really mere details.
The key question is: Has the incidence of corruption reduced since the inception of EFCC? If, as anecdotal evidence suggests (and from what succeeding governments tell us of their predecessors in office) the malaise seems to be rather increasing, one needs no further evidence to conclude that the EFCC and similar institutions used in fighting corruption in the past simply have failed.
In the current situation where the structural and environmental factors that predispose people to corrupt practices are increasing, it makes it even more difficult for the EFCC to succeed. The EFCC, like the other contraptions before it, seems to spend too much energy fighting the symptoms of what is a more fundamental social malaise.
That each chairman of the Commission since it was created ended up from being a hunter to the hunted and also has allegations of corruption against him or her, tells volumes. Therefore, because of the above reasons clearly stated, I feel the conversation is ripe to be about the scrapping of EFCC as an institution and strengthen instead the various institutions and mechanisms we find in the formal sectors of our national life that are meant to checkmate abuses and impunity.
My feeling is that the EFCC undermines the development of all other systems, a form of duplicity and mechanisms by making people believe that ‘gra-gra’ is the only method of mitigating corruption.
The truth is that a system can be very effective as we have in the mature democracies. We need therefore to re-set the whole fight against corruption such that it will be institution-driven and without the ‘gra-gra’ from illegality called the EFCC.
Fighting corruption using the failed a illegal systems of the past in a society like ours is still one of the reasons why many corruption cases get stalled in the courts. Harassing judges as seen in the country countless times to get more convictions is also not the way to go. It is better for hundred criminals to go free than for one innocent citizen to be erroneously convicted.
While securing convictions is important, it is even more important to pose and answer the question of why the incidence of corruption and corrupt practices are not abating despite the EFCC and similar institutions.
We must therefore as a country charge the Executive, the judiciary and the legislature to immediately commence the process of scrapping the EFCC to save the Nation of further embarrassment.
