By Sunny Anderson Osiebe...
Hon. Kayode Oladele is a member of
the Nigerian House of Representatives, representing Imeko Afon/Yewa North
Federal Constituency in Ogun state, Nigeria. He is currently the chairman,
House committee on Financial Crimes that superintends and oversees the Economic
and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC), the foremost Nigerian anti-corruption
agency. In this interview with the African Leadership magazine, Hon. Oladele
outlines the achievements of the anti-graft agency buoyed by the House
committee’s support to the agency. Excerpt.
It has been almost two years and it
won’t be wrong to say the pivotal achievement of the current administration has
been a sustained war against corruption, which is driven by the EFCC – an
agency you oversee. What would you say is the status of that fight?
Before we take a look at the fight
against corruption, we also need to look at the journey into how the EFCC was
established. Let’s have a retrospective analysis of the EFCC before and EFCC
now. The emergence of the country’s Fourth Republic was marked with the
emergence of President Olusegun Obasanjo, a former military ruler as Nigeria’s
Head of State on May 29 1999. Prior to that time, it had been estimated that
about US$400 billion was stolen between 1960 and 1999. Based on his conviction
that corruption remains a major challenge of the country, two distinct
anti-corruption agencies were created: the EFCC and the Independent Corrupt
Practices and Other Related Offences Commission (ICPC). The EFCC was therefore,
created and empowered to prevent, investigate and prosecute economic and
financial crimes as entailed in the Banks and Financial Institutions Act 1991,
Miscellaneous Offences Act, the Money Laundering Act 1995, the Failed Banks
(Recovery of Debts) and Financial Malpractices in Banks Act 1994, the Advance
Fee Fraud and Other Fraud Related Offences Act 1995, the Economic and Financial
Crimes Commission Act (2004), and the Money Laundering and (Prohibition) Act
2004.
The EFCC under the administration of
the Former President Goodluck Jonathan was unable to perform some of its basic
responsibilities and mandate, due to the lack of political will on the part of
that administration. Apart from the political inertia that I talked
about, there was also a conscious effort on the part of the government of the
day at the time to starve the commission of funds so that the commission will
not be able to perform its basic functions effectively. The budgets were always
very meager and the commission was unable improve the capacity of its core
staff.
I can tell you that the EFCC has now
been repositioned. The current administration has a political will and
President Buhari has left no one in doubt as to his determination to rid the
country of the scourge of corruption. The National Assembly is also on the same
page with President Buhari as encapsulated in the House of Representatives
Legislative Agenda as well as the National Assembly’s budgetary provision for
the Commission in the 2016 Appropriation Act. The result is that the
combination of this political will and the provision of adequate funding by the
president administration has added fillip to the Commission’s activities and I
can safely conclude that the fight against corruption is more robust now than
before.
What is your committee doing to
support the EFCC towards attracting more international funding and support?
The country is fast gaining
credibility the world over. Multinational agencies are coming back as they can
see the commitment on the part of the president, the legislature and the EFCC.
Various countries are also showing interest in assisting us in the fight
against corruption.
EFCC have no doubt recovered so
much. What is your take about the recovered funds and are the recovered funds
already deployed toward improving key societal needs?
Let me quickly tell you here that
most of the assets recovered are held under interim forfeiture orders and
cannot be converted to use immediately until they have been permanently
forfeited to the government. This is because the Nigeria legal system does not
have civil assets recovery process. We have criminal asset recovery system
which implies that every corruption case has to be proved beyond a reasonable
doubt. The implication of this is that even though we have seized a lot of
these assets under temporary Court orders, we cannot dispose of the assets
until final verdict of guilt is entered and the Courts have ordered the final
forfeiture of the seized assets. For now, the EFCC is a custodian of most of
the seized assets; they are not the properties of government and therefore,
cannot be converted for development purposes until the cases are finally
disposed as I said earlier.
Why then the Interim Orders?
The purpose of the interim forfeiture
order is to make sure that the accused person does not have access to the
assets while the case is on-going. If you don’t freeze these accounts, there
are chances that the accused persons may deplete the accounts before the final
conclusion of the case. To that effect, most of the assets recovered so far are
held under the interim forfeiture orders and we cannot hand it over to the
government to spend unless there is a voluntary surrender by the accused
person.
We also should know that some of the
funds do not belong to the Federal government alone. Some belong to the state
governments, private companies or individuals.
What is the future of the fight
against corruption in Nigeria?
Well, the fight against corruption
should be the collective action of everybody. Like i said in one of my
speeches, fighting corruption without the involvement of the people can be
likened to trying to control erosion and flooding with palm tree fences. It
cannot withstand it. So, it involves the collective action of everybody. We all
have to participate. Most times we look at politically exposed persons as the
only form of corruption in the society, forgetting the fact that corruption is
endemic in the society. For instance, we have petty corruption. We have
corruption within institutions. The politically exposed persons evolved from
the society, not outside the society. So if you have a corrupt society, it will
only produce corrupt leaders.
Corruption in Africa has a lot of
socio-cultural implications attached to it. We should all fight corruption with
one voice. For example, while I was with the EFCC as Chief of Staff, when James
Ibori, former Delta state governor was charged to court on grounds of
corruption, the matter was first assigned to a judge in Kaduna. The people from
delta state will hire buses, in their hundreds, to Kaduna state, wearing
pro-Ibori uniforms, and abusing EFCC staff. They felt that why should it be
Ibori; that he is not the only thief. So they will take it from prosecution to
persecution. They will look at it as persecution on the ground that he is
from a minority.
We all have to speak against
corruption in one voice. The same people the EFCC is fighting for, the poor and
marginalized will be accusing EFCC of persecution. In the case of Ibori, when
the judge denied him a bail application, the people pulled down the fence of
the court.
Except we all see it as an endemic
problem in the society, it may be hard to fight. But the people are becoming
wiser with some of the new revelation such as the arms deal relating to the
office of the National Security Adviser. They are now seeing the light of
the day. I think we are getting there but we need international support.
There is a popular saying that when
you fight corruption, corruption fights back. What is your take on the issue of
the Judiciary as partner in the fight against corruption and corruption
fighting back?
The Judiciary and the legal system
is one crucial factor in the fight against corruption. It is not just the EFCC
that is in charge, the buck stops at the judiciary’s table. This is because the
EFCC is only concerned with investigation. The conviction is in the hands of
the court. Even if the EFCC does a thorough investigation and does its work
very well in prosecution, if the court still feels that the case has not been
proved beyond reasonable doubt, the court can acquit the person. Therefore, for
there to be an effective fight against corruption, the judiciary and the
activities of the EFCC has to be looked into. In Nigeria today, I can tell you sadly
that we have problems with the judiciary, not with everybody though. The
president has said it, and I agree with him, that the judiciary has to be
cleansed because of some judges. Some of them work in tandem with some senior
lawyers to frustrate some of the corruption cases. Sometime they adjourn the
cases so many times. A case may take as much as 8-10 years to complete. If a
case takes this long, you know very well that in the process a lot may have
happened. There will a loss of confidence in the judiciary. The victims or
witnesses may have been relocated to other places; some may even die. Some of
the investigators may have been redeployed. Another way of frustrating the
cases is through interlocutory appeals. As a result of this, you will find
that sometimes the main case can be left untouched for about five years when
the appeals are being pursued. For instance, former Rivers state Governor Peter
Odili’s case has been in court in the past 10 years, and it is still at the
level of interlocutory appeals.
The good news is that the judiciary
on their own addressed the matter and came up with what they call, practice
directions. The judiciary issues practice directions for High Court, the Court
of Appeal and the Supreme Court. The directions stated that cases involving
terrorism and corruption should be given a speedy trial. But many judges do not
give any attention to the practice directions.
The good thing also is that just at
the twilight of the last administration, the National Assembly passed a bill:
the administration of the criminal justice act. The bill was signed into law by
the immediate past President Goodluck Jonathan. That bill revolutionized the
entire criminal justice system in Nigeria. The speedy trial now is a legal
requirement and there is an express bar against interlocutory appeals that it
should be reserved after judgment. The law also frowns against multiples
adjournments. So I believe that the act is in operation right now. I encourage
Nigerians to take advantage of this review.
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