Who Is Going To Explain To The EFCC Chairman That His Job Is To Prosecute Corrupt Leaders, and Not Cry Over The Case Files?*

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WE, AT FADEYI SIDE OF LIFE ARE TIRED Of WATCHING THE EFCC CHAIRMAN PUBLICLY WHINE ABOUT THE CORRUPT SYSTEM INSTEAD DOING HIS JOB OF CLEANING IT UP!- Who is going to explain to Mr. EFCC Chair that his job is to bring the corrupt leaders to book and not to tell us how bad the system is?*

Today I was provoked to go to my Fadeyi Balcony and talk my own about our nation as I watched the video of yet another statement from our hyperactive (though it’s all motion, but no real movement) EFCC chairman complaining YET AGAIN about the problems with doing his work as the #1 enforcer against economic crimes in our land.

This time he was saying stuff like and I quote him verbatim : “ When I look at some case files and see the humongous amount of money stolen, I wonder how we are still surviving. If you see some case files, you will weep – EFCC Chairman, Ola Olukoyede”.

Really? So our law enforcer wants us to weep with him about the decadence of some of our public officers instead of asking us to join in getting all of them arrested and jailed as part of our ‘citizen arrest’ powers? Oma se o.🤷🏿‍♂️ Can someone please tell this nice Ikoyi man that we did not hire him to weep over the crime files, and we are done weeping for ourselves, but we now need him to prosecute the people in those files without fear or favor?

Not only did he whine about the extent of the rot he was supposed to be cleaning up, he also came up with a ‘great’ idea that would ‘solve’ our problem in Nigeria. Now he says, through his director of media that
“To this end, the EFCC now has a Department of Fraud Risk and Assessment and Control”

According to our top EFCC man, spoken through his top aide , “Let’s look at our system of revenue generation. It is a system that allows leakages in mobilisation and appropriation of funds. If we don’t look at the system, we will continue to chase shadows. In this direction, we are not just going to investigate and recover; what we have decided to do in the EFCC is Policy Review.  If we can block some of these leakages and have 50 per cent of capital project execution in Nigeria, the country would be fine,”

So, EFCC will not just prosecute but will now get involved in the risk assessment policies and procedures of the government’s banking practices because according to him ‘there are too many loopholes’ in the bureaucracy that allowed our public servants to steal at will and EFCC will be involved in plugging those loopholes systemically.

Hmmmm.

To be fair, this idea of cleaning up our government’s processes and procedures for moving money out of government accounts is not a bad idea but an obvious problem that needed to be solved. However, this is an interesting approach from the much-respected, but apparently confused EFCC chairman, which just points out how messed up we really are. The government people are messed up, and even the well-intentioned EFCC chairman himself appears messed up in his thinking. The chairman of EFCC apparently has forgotten his charter by law and now thinks he has a mandate to be not just enforcer of the law but also maker of it and judge of what makes sense or not. This is how overreach starts if he is not immediately called to order to focus on his mandate.

Like most Nigerians, I am also fed up, angry, and embarrassed at the insane levels of looting and corruption in our land, but we must not stop thinking just because we are upset and sometimes feel that we should just burn everything down and start over. As the Yorubas will say, you cannot be so upset that you will then put your hat on your ass instead of your head or something like that (my Yoruba is very bad, I know 🤷🏿‍♂️).

I mean, in what world is the enforcement agency like the EFCC now going to be involved in changing the banking policy of the government or involved in drafting policy for money management for the government? If it’s not that we are confused and lacking in ideas, through and through, from top to bottom in our land?

I watched another video of the same EFCC chairman the other day where he was talking about starting a diversification training and empowerment program to redirect some of the young 419 criminals he arrested to learn legitimate skills and how he wants the EFCC to start organizing training for our at-risk youths who are getting lost in 419 scams. I just laughed.

While the idea of retraining them itself is commendable, it’s ridiculous that the EFCC is the one that wants to do it. It’s this kind of thinking that made our leaders send soldiers to break up the peaceful ENDSARS demonstrations with disastrous results because someone in authority did not bother to think that soldiers are trained to shoot, not negotiate with angry youths.

It’s the same kind of messed up thinking that would make the minister of women affairs just show up and start ‘disciplining’ the teachers of a private school based in Lagos because she read about the abuse of a student in that school without talking to the authorities in Lagos or the minister or even commissioner for education first.

Our institutions are so confused and messed up that everyone just wants to solve a problem they see without regard to their own commissions mandate or recourse to due process.

So now our EFCC wants to become an internet business school for reformed 419 youths. Right?

Again, to be clear, the idea of retraining at-risk youths is a great idea (and I resonate with that 100% since it’s one of my own professed solutions to the mass unemployment situation we found ourselves in), but is this the work of the EFCC? The EFCC is not a training institute for criminals. It is an institution to bring criminals to book!

Very soon, if care is not taken, this EFCC will also want to be part of the appointment of our judges since many of them are corrupt, or decide who should run for elections as senators since many politicians are corrupt, as a way of doing the EFCC’s work in advance.

In my personal opinion, the EFCC chairman means well, and I am one of his biggest fans for always calling things as they are, but I think if care is not taken, he will get carried away by his own air of self-importance while not getting the job they gave him done.

All I hear him talk about are the problems of doing his job instead of actually doing it. Leaders don’t talk about the challenges of their job to their employers (Nigerians) but they find a way to get it done OR RESIGN if they feel the structure is not going to let them do the job. In other words, if the political leaders in the system will keep protecting their colleagues as criminals, then leave the job if it’s impossible for you, but for God’s sake, stop whining in public about the challenges. Mr. EFCC Chair did not come from Mars. He was a senior EFCC man before his appointment as chairman. So he knew the corrupt system he was asked to tame before he took the appointment and should spare us this public hand-wringing.

The EFCC is to arrest and prosecute violators of the law. It is not to make laws and it is not to make policy. That’s why it’s called democracy and separation of powers.

The fact that he believes there are loopholes in the system for corruption (and he is correct that there are indeed loopholes) does not mean he should designate himself the loophole blocker when we have NASS, the executive, and the judiciary with different powers related to that.

I love this EFCC chairman, but I am starting to worry he is concerning himself too much with what is not in his charter.

Let him first prosecute some high-profile cases to conclusion, instead of just jailing hundreds of low-level 419 guys and telling us how effective they are on their website.

In his last public conference, he boasted of how many thousands of convictions his EFCC has secured in one year, and I wanted to clap for him. But then I went to the website, and while there are indeed lots of small-level 419 boys and low-level criminals listed there, I did not see a single top-level government official on that portal. Meaning none of those who stole billions of dollars of our money have been successfully and conclusively prosecuted. All are still ‘awaiting trial.’

We also hear a lot of noise about how much money they have recovered from the looters, but none of them have been made public. So how are the current officers supposed to be deterred from doing the same thing if none of those who have admitted they are thieves by refunding some of the looted funds have been named publicly? The public deserves to know!

Sure, the system is fighting against him, we get that and feel sorry for him, but what exactly did he expect? Was he expecting that supposedly degenerate looters like Yahaya Bello will holistically step out of their houses to collect the handcuffs from him as he led them to jail in their flowing agbada and Rolex wristwatches?

I mean, if the allegations from the chairman himself are true (and I acknowledge nothing has been proved against him yet), then we must be talking about a man who was so absurdly and unintelligently corrupt, that he would pay the school fees of children probably yet unborn all the way to university level with government money, and do it on a document that can be produced publicly by the school. I mean, how dumb can you be as a government looter, if all these are true facts?

It should not surprise anyone that that kind of in-your-face corrupt man, will not go gently to jail. He will surely hide under the boot or agbada of anyone who can save him from arrest. He will not respect court papers, and Mr. EFCC Chairman should have known that before sendign suit wearing Ikoyi EFCC police officers to go and arrest him the Ikoyi way.

We all know that for a man with that kind of reputation, even if only 20th of allegations are true, Only the ‘Fadeyi approach’ will work with these people, and we said so before but they won’t listen.

So the man escaped in broad daylight while his team of EFCC enforcement officers and police were looking at the governor shielding him. The EFCC chairman did not have enough righteous indignation to fire those EFCC officers who failed at the simple task of arresting a wanted fugitive from the law but allowed a governor to illegally shield him from arrest . Yet they had guns while the governor did not have any. Of course they didn’t need ot arrest the governor but they can surely pry the wanted man from under his agbada by force if necessary . No they didn’t do that. They simply crawled back to EFCC chairman’s office to whine to him that the current governor ‘did not let them’ do their job. Wow!

Now, what do we have after that show of ineptitude by the EFCC ? We have our EFCC chairman calling press conferences to complain that wanted fugitives were not giving themselves up as civilized people do and swearing he will resign if the man is not prosecuted. 3 months after the fact he has still not resigned 🤷🏿‍♂️

Seriously? If he is complaining to us about not being able to arrest a former governor with all the resources at his disposal as EFCC Chair, is it me or Femi Falana (or maybe it’s Peter Obi⁩, their favorite person to blame for everything), that would go and arrest him for them?

I say the EFCC Chairman should man up and do his job . Those of us who are his admirers are starting to wonder if we overrated his ability to get things done beyond the normal public complaints that is fast becoming his mantra.

My name is Ope Banwo, the Mayor Of Fadeyi, and I say our EFCC chairman should leave all talk of philosophy about how to restructure our systems alone, stop telling us the problems with his job, and go enforce the law!