Date Published: 08/12/09
EFCC AND THE FIGHT AGAINST CORRUPTION
By Olakunle Babalola
The world over, corruption, in whatever shade or form, has been identified as a major hindrance to economic development and growth of any nation. In Nigeria, the phenomenal status of the menace is next to none and its catastrophic effect on the survival of the nation has continued to be of immense concern to the citizenry of the country. This must have informed the decision by the administration of former President Olusegun Obasanjo to set up two anti-graft agencies within a space of three years at the inception of that regime. Today, the two anti-graft agencies, EFCC and ICPC, have before them the daunting challenge of curbing corruption in our country.
I have deliberately used the word “corruption” to refer to the task before the two agencies, not out of ignorance but as a deliberate attempt to make a point. And the point, is that, it doesn’t really matter what words are used to define the work of the two bodies in the law setting them up, their jobs are related with a singular purpose of ridding our nation of the malaise of corruption. This is where I will like to disagree with a recent article published by a former senate minority leader, Mr. Lawal Shaibu , entitled “EFCC has no mandate to fight corruption”. I do not know what Mr. Shaibu intends to achieve with the write up, but obviously it is more of a futile academic attempt to cause confusion through deficient definitions.
Even though there is yet to be an acceptable or comprehensive definition of corruption across the world because of its complex nature and diversity from continent to continent and country to country, I have read several literature where both corruption and economic crime are used as synonyms. Apart from the fact that both economic crime and corruption are overlapping concepts, with experts using them together and interchangeably, it has also been validly argued that corruption is a predicate offence of economic crime.
What do I mean? Let’s imagine a scenario where a public officer takes a bribe of #50 million over a state project. He or She decides to lodge this money in a bank account in Nigeria or takes the money for safe keep in an offshore account outside the country. If at this point, an anti-graft agency like the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission gets the alert and moves in to investigate, what would have been wrong in this? Would EFCC investigate an obvious case of money laundering without investigating the predicate offence of bribery which we refer to as corruption in this part? From this single example, it is crystal clear that both economic crime and corruption are over lapping concepts which can hardly be separated in any distinct manner as Mr. Shaibu attempted to do in his piece.
Again, to drive home this point, a Yoruba adage will suffice here. My Yoruba people will rightly say that if a man sights a snake and a woman kills it, what is important is that the snake should not escape. As such, what is important at this stage of our nation’s history is that all hands must be on deck to fight a common enemy, it doesn’t matter whether we call it corruption or economic crime, neither does it cause us any pain whether it is EFCC or ICPC that the system has thrown up to spear head the battle.
Across the world, corruption is seen as a global phenomenon and a threat to a nation’s survival especially developing economies like ours.
This is why serious attention and huge resources are being committed to fighting the menace. Given the extreme diversity of this crime, not even EFCC and ICPC put together are enough to prevent or control the malaise. We need all efforts and everyone. And this is why the recent Anti-Corruption Revolution Campaign of the EFCC will suffice. All of us will have to take the fight and treat it as our struggle if our nation must survive. As the Senate President, David Mark rightly observed at a recent function, given the problem of corruption in Nigeria, there is nothing wrong in having an EFCC and ICPC in every home and office in Nigeria and should it become necessary, to create additional similar agencies in every home and office.
As such, the attempt of Mr. Shaibu has no place in the present effort to battle a serious problem confronting our nation. It is unfortunate that while his successors in the senate especially the senator Sola Akinyede led senate committee on Drugs, Narcotics and Anti-Corruption are working to strengthen the two anti-graft agencies for greater performance, Mr. shaibu is engaged in an attempt to draw back the process. Whatever deficiency he was trying to point out in the Acts setting up the two agencies is surely an indictment on his own generation of law makers who passed the two Acts during his time as a senator.
Any attempt to create an impression that the EFCC is doing what it has not been statutorily empowered to do is deceitful and is consistent with global efforts to fight a ravaging menace. We need no one to bore us with the difference between corruption and economic crime, the solution to the problem is what we need because they are surely two sides of a coin and we need not castigate any genuine effort to solve this problem, not even now that majority of Nigerians are still yearning for more efforts from the EFCC especially.
Olakunle Babalola,
A lawyer and public affairs analyst wrote in from Eleyele, Ile-Ife, Osun State.
