.expresses collaboration on fight against corruption

By Gabriel Ewepu

ABUJA – AN anti-corruption organization, AfroRedFlag White Collar Preventive Shield, Monday, urged the Federal Government to prioritize preventing corruption over reactive measures.

The Founder of AfroRedFlag Protective Programme, Prof Mannixs Paul, made the call during press briefing in Abuja, while speaking on the issues affecting the anti-corruption war in Nigeria.

Prof Paul also asserted that criminal justice system in Nigeria demands critical reforms to make it effective in the fight against corruption.

He said: “The present state of Nigeria is that laws made don’t provide enabling environment, and this is so applicable to the area of promoting forensic in organizations and to fight crime in society but forensic itself is not the end goal. The end goal will go down to the criminal justice system.

“Like AfroRedFlag, we believe that it is better to prevent the crime than rather fighting the crime because fighting white collar crime is no winning issue. People will steal their money at the same time and use that money to fight the system, and we cannot win.

“Therefore, what we are advocating is that we have to prevent the crime rather than fighting the crime. We should focus more on preventing the crime, and that is where Artificial Intelligence and forensic come in, for us to know the real cause of the issues because if really there are two fundamental factors that are responsible for things that happen- the remote cause and the immediate cause.

“Most of the time, we look at the immediate cause without focusing on the remote cause. So if we really want to solve problems in society, we should focus more on the remote cause because if the remote cause has been taken care of, then it will be able to take care of the problem that is happening in society.

He also noted that Nigerian government had been fighting crime before the establishment of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, EFCC, Independent Corrupt Practices Commission, ICPC, among others the corruption index was relatively low but with their creation “our transparency rating is still down. Why is it that it is down? Because when laws are made, and the laws are not addressing the issues, what we need to do is to re-evaluate, and come up with new ideas because we cannot fight fraud and corruption or crime in society in one way.”

However, Prof Paul who doubles as the Global Chairman, Chartered Examiners of Criminology and Forensic Investigation, emphasized the National Orientation Agency, NOA, is to seriously embark on sensitize the youth and engage them in the fight against corruption and prevent it.

He also warned that, “The issue is that if we continue in this sloping path, it’s going to destroy the nation, the future, and now it’s the responsibility for this generation to do something so that we can set up a system because if any nation that has no system, everything goes down.”

He said his organization AfroRedFlag Protective Programme as anti-corruption, anti-violence, anti-terrorism is ready to collaborate with the government “to promote good governance and to make sure that organizations benefit from what they are doing, and we help investors to make sure that they achieve the purpose of investment.

“And our goal is to promote ethics and to bring compliance and to make sure that people really understand what they can do about the business they are doing because what is going on in society today is unlike times in the times past.”