NIGERIANS want anyone who is chairman of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) to be combative, aggressive, urgent and unrelenting. This is why they took to Nuhu Ribadu, a former chairman of the commission, and are indulging Ibrahim Magu, the current chairman, despite his many foibles and lack of policy and ideational robustness. Mallam Ribadu is a lawyer and seemed, regardless of his customary impatience, to put on flimsy acts that were a reluctant sop to the rule of law. Mr Magu is so angry with everything that he is not aware he exudes messianic airs, not to talk of alarmingly seeming to have even outgrown the constitution of the republic. A few days ago, he angrily reacted to calls for the separation of the EFCC’s investigative and prosecutorial powers, describing the Nigerian Bar Association (NBA) as ‘populated by rogues and vultures’. It mattered little to him that it was the new president of the association who made the suggestion, not even the NBA.
Abubakar Mahmoud was on August 26 in Port Harcourt inaugurated as president of the NBA. In his inaugural speech, he called for the EFCC to be, as it were, unbundled to enable it focus more appropriately on the onerous job of investigating financial crimes and other acts of corruption. As Mr Magu sneeringly said, Mr Mahmoud was not the first to make that call. Here is what the NBA president said that inexplicably goaded the anti-graft czar into a fit: “The Nigerian Bar Association commits itself to the fight against corruption in Nigeria. We will put our knowledge, our skills and all resources to combat corruption and reclaim the dignity of Nigerians and of our country. We recognize however that the fight against corruption can only be achieved if we do so within the framework of the rule of law and by strong institutions. The critical institutions involved must be repositioned and reequipped and retooled to confront the problem of corruption on a consistent sustainable basis.”
He goes on to suggest: “As a start, we commend the efforts of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission for the work it is doing and for its modest achievements. However, going forward the NBA must demand the reform of the institution itself. We need to define its mandate more narrowly and more clearly. In my view its broad operations as an investigative and prosecutorial agency should be reviewed. I recommend strongly that the EFCC be limited to investigation. The decision to prosecute and the conduct of the prosecution must be by an independent highly resourced prosecution agency. In addition, the EFCC and the prosecution agency must be secured from political interference in their activities. There is absolutely no reason for it to report operationally or otherwise to the Presidency.”
Miffed by Mr Mahmoud’s suggestion, which apparently the EFCC boss sees as unbearable effrontery, Mr Magu left the substance of the NBA president’s argument and launched into what he believed motivated the call for the unbundling of the EFCC. Said the EFCC chairman in a statement signed by the commission’s spokesman: “The commission views with concern the call by the NBA president that the EFCC be stripped of its prosecutorial powers. According to him (NBA president), ‘we need to define its mandate more narrowly and more clearly… I strongly recommend that the EFCC be limited to investigation… while prosecution should be handled by an independent resource prosecution agency’. The commission’s discomfort over this seeming innocuous proposition stems from the fact that Mahmoud was silent on the reason for his position…More importantly, the commission cannot comprehend how the redefinition of EFCC’s mandate in narrow terms, ultimately whittling it down, fits into the clamour by Nigerians and the vision of the President Muhammadu Buhari administration for a vibrant and courageous anti-corruption agency.”
Not yet done fishing for motives instead of responding adequately to the NBA president’s argument, the EFCC continues: “Instead, Mahmoud’s suggestion appears perfectly in sync with a cleverly disguised campaign by powerful forces that are uncomfortable with the reinvigorated anti-graft campaign of the EFCC and are hell-bent on emasculating the agency by stripping it of powers to prosecute with the tame excuse that an agency that investigates cannot also prosecute. The question Nigerians must ask the Mahmoud-led NBA is what is wrong with EFCC prosecution? Mahmoud is in a position to answer this question. He was the federal attorney-general’s counsel in the trial of ex-Delta State governor, James Ibori, at the Federal High Court, Asaba, a case which EFCC lost in questionable circumstances. But the same ingredients from that case were used to fetch Ibori a 13-year jail term in London. Mahmoud is also the commission’s counsel in the appeal against the infamous perpetual injunction from arrest and prosecution by former Rivers State Governor, Peter Odili, which is still pending before the Court of Appeal in Port Harcourt, many years after it was filed.”
Finally, the EFCC statement gave its verdict: One, that, “A Bar populated or directed by people perceived to be rogues and vultures cannot play the role of priests in the temple of justice.” And two, that, “It is too much of a strange coincidence that the suggestion to strip the EFCC of its prosecutorial powers is being floated a few months after the commission, in unprecedented fashion, arraigned some senior lawyers for corruption…Against this background, the campaign appears to be self-serving, intended to create a cabal of untouchables that can be investigated but may never be prosecuted.” It was a clever ploy by the EFCC to appeal to public emotions over the controversy when the commission itself had not addressed the substance of the NBA president’s arguments. Mr Mahmoud has responded again to the EFCC umbrage by debunking some of the planks of the anti-graft agency’s accusations, including his alleged involvement in the ex-governor James Ibori case. Let the NBA and the EFCC and other interested persons slug it out, as indeed they are already doing bad-temperedly on social media and newspaper pages. This column is interested in something else.
The EFCC has a right to protect and advance the laws that empower its operations. Indeed, they have a right to seek to expand those powers in order to make their operations more efficient. If the public have reservations about those powers or fail to appreciate the need for the operations of the agency to be strengthened, its officers and leaders have the right to go all out to argue their case, find eloquent protagonists and deploy them accordingly. Many times in the past, the EFCC had exploited these options and had presented its case before the public, sometimes successfully, but sometimes unsuccessfully. But it is arrogant and illogical of the EFCC to seek to take away the right of those who think the EFCC is not set up in such a manner as to be efficient, or who, like the NBA president, think the EFCC can be reformed to make it more operationally efficient.
This column has read Mr Mahmoud’s inaugural speech and can find nothing in it that indicates preconceived or virulent hostility to the EFCC. Perhaps Mr Magu has the gift of psychoanalysing his critics, and can detect traitors to the national cause from 1000km away. Even then, as far as the EFCC’s peevish response to the NBA president’s suggestion goes, it was nothing but a dangerous assignment of motives, a cocktail of messianic propaganda, and a clumsy attempt to take refuge in mass hysteria and executive deification. This is precisely one of the things the NBA appeared to be worried about. Under Mallam Ribadu, and now under Mr Magu, the EFCC has joyfully but unhealthily attached itself to the apron strings of a deified executive. Mallam Ribadu groveled before ex-president Olusegun Obasanjo; Mr Magu stands and works in brazen awe of President Buhari. This is both unhealthy and indefensible.
It is not clear whether the NBA president’s argument is the best or even the wisest. But the paranoia, blackmail and abuse the EFCC appears to embrace and idolise are also unhelpful and demeaning. The NBA president has triggered a debate about whether to unbundle the EFCC or not. It is a debate that can be engaged in by everyone sensibly, coherently and patriotically. It is disgusting to think the constitution guarantees freedom of speech and expression but the EFCC bosses who have outgrown the country’s grundnorm must take away those rights by recklessly assigning and ascribing malicious motives to dissenters. This columnist has, for instance, not made up his mind whether to support the EFCC status quo or to back the option of unbundling. It is important that whichever way he votes must not be twisted and misconstrued by a bunch of intolerant and spiteful public officers who have private contempt for the constitution.
Undoubtedly, the problems of corruption, insecurity and other evils are rather huge and unsettling, even threatening the peace and stability of the republic. But how the country approaches and tackles these problems will determine what the future will look like. It is often said that black people have no significant sense of the day after tomorrow, with the here and now being more important to them. Nigeria must begin to put the lie to that stereotype by organising its affairs more scientifically, restrainedly and futuristically. A sense of the importance of the here and now must never be allowed to jeopardise a sense of tomorrow and the day after.
The Buhari presidency has not given his sceptics confidence that he thinks through his responses to the challenges facing the country. It is time he reordered things while still staying faithful and firm to the values he has sought to bring to governance. The EFCC has sometimes acted messianically; the Department of State Service (DSS) has sometimes given the impression the rule of law is an inconvenience; and until recently, the military had to be compelled to fight insurgency in the Northeast with the forceful decorum of a great military. But whether the EFCC, DSS or even the military, none of them has acted consistently with genuine passion and respect for the rule of law. Nor, as it is also obvious, has the presidency itself, especially in the case of the Shiites.
In fact, if critics had not consistently belaboured the Buhari presidency in those giddy early days of his government, when he was riding roughshod over the judiciary and the rule of law, Nigeria would have become like the Philippines of President Rodrigo Duterte whose maniacal approach to fighting societal ills, not to talk of his bizarre and indulgent view of rape and his own prurient, dark instincts, has led to the extrajudicial killing of thousands of Filipino, some of them innocent, and the unwholesome desecration of the media, justice system, military and police establishments. This often happens when emotions, rather than rationality, rule, and when aggressive people of inferior minds, as the Philippines shows, preside over their betters. It is time public agencies began to operate strictly along constitutional lines. There is no alternative. If they will not, the public must eschew emotionalism to put pressure on them to observe the rule of law.
This column had, a few weeks ago, asked for Mr Magu to be confirmed by the Senate, but with a caveat that he must be restrained from his impetuous habit of sniveling at the constitution. Given his intemperate reaction to the NBA president’s argument over EFCC powers, it is now all the more important that the anti-graft czar must be grilled closely by the Senate before he is given the green light. He must hope for his own sake and career that skipping over the vetting hurdles is not beyond his intellectual agility, and that his now famous passion for work can find some redemptive value in a system that excuses undisciplined evasion of rules. The discomfiting irony, however, is that the legislature itself is not a model of financial and moral rectitude; yet it must screen and vet others. Nor, unhappily, are the executive and the judiciary above suspicion. The herculean task before Nigerians is that they need to recognise that salvaging their country must never be surrendered to tin-pot messiahs, closet religious fanatics many of whom populate government houses, and intolerant and abusive careerists in ministries and agencies. It is a collective job requiring vigilance, introspection and deep and suave application of intellect.
