Mr Richard Akinnola, Publisher/Editor-in-Chief of CORRUPTION CASES DIGEST talks to Saturday Vanguard on his assessment of the first year in office of the Chairman of Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC), Mr Ola Olukoyede

What’s your take on the case filed by 16 governors asking the Supreme Court to scrap the EFCC?
Well, the matter is sub-judice, so one needs to be careful from going into the merits or demerits of the case.

That is left to the Supreme Court which has adjourned the matter for judgment. However, the point needs to be emphasized that if some people were not feeling the intense heat of the EFCC, the thought of scrapping the Commission wouldn’t have arisen in the first place. So, to that extent, it shows the EFCC is working, irrespective of some of its shortcomings. In the last 20 years of its existence, there are more positives than negatives regarding the EFCC’s anti-corruption war.

Many people are not even aware that the liberalization of financial transactions through the use of MasterCard and Visa, was the handiwork of the EFCC, after the global financial anti-corruption institutions had to delist Nigeria among those barred from such transactions. So, there are more positives one can point to regarding the activities of the EFCC. Do we say because there are excesses by the Nigeria police and DSS, that they should be scrapped? It means you are only cutting your nose to spite your face.

The same people who are against financial autonomy for the local governments and State judiciary, are the same people who want the EFCC to be scrapped. Otherwise, if their intention were pure and altruistic, they would have approached the apex court to give effect to Justiciability of chapter two of the constitution regarding free education and other welfare packages for the citizens but because they are afraid of what would befall them after leaving office, they want the Commission scrapped. We all wait for the Supreme Court judgment.

The current Chairman of EFCC, Mr Ola Olukoyede has just spent one year in office, what’s your assessment of his first year in office?

I’m not someone that panders to adulating public officials but I must say without any equivocation that I have been greatly impressed by the accomplishments of the EFCC Chairman in the past one year. That is why I was taken aback by the very unfair comments of Prof. Oditah, KC, a very senior lawyer that I respect a lot. Speaking on Arise Television, Prof. Oditah made sweeping generalizations in his criticism of the EFCC which he dubbed corrupt and only after yahoo boys who defraud people of petty money.

First, if he had been a victim of yahoo boys where his life savings were wiped out, he wouldn’t downplay or view with levity the atrocities of these guys. Beyond that, the respected professor was guilty of sweeping generalizations by dubbing the commission as being corrupt without any empirical evidence.

While I concede that just like any other institution, including the Scotland Yard and the British Metropolitan police, there are bad eggs, it’s an unfair assessment to stereotype the Organisation as corrupt without specific details. For instance, because a British court recently discharged and acquitted a policeman over the murder of a black man, does that suggest that the Metropolitan police is racist? Yes, there are bad eggs in the commission just like any other institution but that doesn’t mean you can stereotype an organization with the tar brush of corruption. It’s just like the judiciary having its own fair share of corrupt judges.

Does that translate to describing the whole judiciary institution as being corrupt? It’s like him dismissing the 20 year-old Organisation as being ineffective all these two decades. That is a very unfair assessment by such a seminal person like Prof Oditah. And that brings me to some of the accomplishments of the Commission.

If you knew the humongous task it is to fight corruption in this system, with limited staff and resources, you would praise the gentleman at the helm of affairs. Fighting corruption is not a tea party because the corrupt political class would fight back as it’s currently happening. In June this year, the EFCC Chairman said the Commission received 14, 000 petitions within a year. With limited staff and resources, how do you start sifting through this plethora of petitions and investigating the same? Some months ago, I was at a lecture held by HERDA in which the Chairman was the guest speaker.

He recalled that a few minutes to midnight on December 31 last year, he received intelligence on his phone how multiple billions of Naira were being moved from some ministries and MDAs to certain banks and that he immediately called the bank MDs to warn them not to allow any withdrawal of such humongous amounts. You know that usually such unspent money ought to be returned to the treasury but these people decided to fleece them.

These are accomplishments you don’t hear in the public space and it takes a proactive and diligent anti-corruption helmsman to detect and nip this in the bud. So, it’s not an accident that the current media onslaught against the current leadership of the Commission is suspected to be sponsored and financed by a former governor and his surrogate successor. You see the whole media place with heavy media and legal advocacy, including sponsored editorials and press conferences, protests by all manner of groups and the rest. All these are to change narratives in the public space because they are feeling the heat of one man called Olukoyede.

In one year on the saddle, he secured 3,440 convictions, that is 1,000 more than what his predecessor achieved within a year and within the same one year, he recovered an unprecedented whopping N248 billion, apart from others in foreign currencies. All these , apart from some high-profile prosecutions including about three cases involving former CBN Governor, Godwin Emefiele which involves forfeiture of his over 2billion dollars in money and property. These are yeo man’s feats. Hypothetically, if the Supreme Court rules in favour of the governors and the EFCC is scrapped and the trial of Emefiele and other prosecutions are discontinued, who loses? It’s not Olukoyede but the nation.

The gentleman would just go back to his law practice and life goes on. We should then return all the seized assets of Diezani and apologize to her for disturbing her peace. So, people must look at the bigger picture, irrespective of the shortcomings of the commission.

Critics of the Commission have alleged high-handedness in some of the operations of the commission. An example was the storming of a private radio station in Enugu and stopping a live programme, all in the effort to arrest the anchor of the programme. As someone who is an advocate of freedom of expression, what’s your take on this?

I deprecate the conduct of the operatives of the Enugu zonal office of the EFCC involved in that operation and I align myself with the position of the National Broadcasting Commission (NBC), which criticized such an action of busting into a studio and interrupting a live programme. That is unacceptable to me and I hope the leadership of the Commission would call the operatives involved to order that such cannot be tolerated in future.

I’m aware that the leadership of the commission had in the recent past directed an investigation into a viral video where some operatives invaded the privacy of some guests in a hotel. I don’t condone such abuses but such isolated negative situations cannot be used to judge the operation of the commission .

The Yahaya Bello issue has been a knotty challenge for the commission which has been accused of treating him with kid gloves. What’s your perspective on this?

First, if anyone has followed the trajectory of this matter, he would realise that the former governor, right from the word go, had deployed legal subterfuge to evade prosecution. I’m aware there are two cases with the sum total of about N140billion alleged larceny against him in two Abuja courts. The legal see-saw is still ongoing.

Some critics of the commission said it should have deployed extreme tactics to arrest the former governor, but it was the same people that criticized the Commission a few years ago when such high-handed tactic was used to apprehend Rochas Okorocha. So, it’s a catch-22 situation. But very soon, I’m sure the legal hurdles against his arraignment would be scaled and it would be left for the judiciary to adjudicate his culpability or otherwise.

Does it bother you that all past chairmen of the commission had been removed unceremoniously?

Of course, it’s not the best. People put their lives on the line to fight such a humongous monster called corruption and then humiliated out of office just like that. I hope that doesn’t happen again.