Editorial

Full disclosure is a critical pillar of the anti-corruption battle. That is why the essence of a major law targeted at cracking the corruption nut, the Freedom of Information Act, is disclosure – proactively and on demand. Non-disclosure is the bane of other anti-graft exertions, like the code of conduct rule by which public officers are required to declare their assets before taking office, but confidentially so. Nothing disinfects like the sunlight, as they say.

Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) Chairman Abdulrasheed Bawa did not seem to take this to heart when he said that his agency had investigated a female government minister over a $37.5million property deal, but failed to provide necessary details. Speaking on Tuesday, last week, in an interview on Channels Television, he lamented that the real estate sector was becoming a major conduit for laundry of ill-gotten wealth and used the case of the said minister as illustration. According to him, the EFCC “investigated a matter in which a bank MD marketed a property to a minister of the Federal Republic and the minister agreed to purchase that property. And then, negotiations took place back and forth. At the end of the day, the minister agreed that, ‘yes’, she is interested in buying the property, agreed for $37.5million. Now, the bank sent a vehicle to her house and then, in the first instance, $20million was evacuated from her house. The bank succeeded in putting it into their system, and they paid the developer.”

He added: “And then, a lawyer set up a special purpose vehicle where the title documents were now transferred into. Of course, he was posing as if he was the owner of that property; you can see how the problem is?…Without the help of the bankers, the minister couldn’t even have imagined collecting $20million from anybody. And without the opportunity in the real sector, she (minister) couldn’t have thought of where to even launder the proceeds of crime. And this is just one of such cases happening on a daily basis in this country.”

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Of course, the personae fingered in that narrative were too small a sub-set not to fuel curiosity in the citizenry as to specific identities involved. Many people speculated it was a serving minister, and wondered why she was yet being retained in government even if EFCC had not concluded its procedures leading to prosecution. It was that curiosity Bawa was confronted with later last week at the Presidential Media Team ministerial briefing in Abuja, upon which he explained that he wasn’t referring to a serving minister and named former petroleum resources minister Diezani Alison-Madueke as the alleged buyer.

But it was totally needless that the EFCC boss made partial disclosure with the narrative in the first place, and thereby stoked speculations on a matter that was fairly straightforward. Unless he harboured doubts about his facts, it is hardly news that the ex-oil minister is widely viewed as a poster girl of graft under the Goodluck Jonathan era. After all, it was only in May that the same Bawa made public that his commission had seized jewelry with an estimated value of N14.4billion and houses worth $80million from the former minister. At barely four months into the saddle, it is too early for him to keep Nigerians in suspense as could hamper building public confidence in the new EFCC leadership.

We commend the anti-graft agency, of course, for its exploits in the fight to retrieve our common wealth that has been illicitly cornered into private pockets; and the challenge is obviously enormous considering that Bawa last Thursday said the commission in just 100 days recovered $261million, £13,000 and N6billion illegally acquired by suspected looters. We also urge EFCC to beam its searchlight on all suspects coming within its radar – including facilitators of graft. But lesson must be learnt that it would not help to short-shrift on harmless information. That is the moral of the property deal narrative.