Column
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| By Dan Agbese |
PRESIDENT Muhammadu Buhari is yet to unfold his war plans against corruption. But I suppose it is safe to believe that with his cabinet of round pegs in round holes, he must be thinking seriously now of turning his attention to the earnest prosecution of this war. After all, the war is actually the people’s mandate in giving him the keys to Aso Rock.
No, the president has not forgotten that. Both at the inauguration of his cabinet and the swearing of new permanent secretaries last week, he warned for the nth time that his administration would not condone corruption. Such warnings in the past did not faze corruption or deter the corrupt. It is not news that most Nigerians – and I underline the word, most – see public office essentially as their time to make it. Warnings don’t move hills, let alone mountains. We, the people, want to see an action plan or to use the more politically correct lingo, a road map that takes the nation from point A to point B in this rather messy business of making honest people out of fellow Nigerians.
Those of us who want to see the president win this war must have the audacity to offer him suggestions as critical steps for his constructing the road map. Let me start with what should peck up the president’s ears – the informed views of the Chief Justice of Nigeria, Mr Justice Mahmud Mohammed, on the scrappy prosecution of the anti-graft war by the anti-graft agencies.
Two weeks ago as of this writing, members of the Nigeria Electronic Fraud Forum visited him. The deputy governor (operations) of the Central Bank of Nigeria, Alhaji Suleiman Barau, led the delegation.
I had not heard of this anti-fraud body before. The word, ‘forum,’ in its name unfortunately suggests it is perhaps a discussion group and not strictly an anti-fraud body keeping a keen eye on electronic fraud, a growing global crime that threatens the world economy. Talk of a misleading name. Barau told the CJN his forum was set up in response to “the anticipated rise in e-fraud on imminent increase in electronic payments in the country” in the wake of the ‘cash-less policy.’ E-payment promoted as a safe, modern and civilised system of financial transactions. It seems it is not that safe after all. Wahala looms in the horizon.
The anti-graft war has morphed into a permanent war in which the criminals are the winners and we, the people, are the losers. And they laugh in our face. It seems to me that Justice Mohammed watches the prosecution of the war in the courts with barely concealed contempt for the anti-graft agencies. I believe that like most of us, he wants to see the anti-graft agencies prosecute the war with a sense of honest and professional commitment and provide the courts the essential legal materials for judging each case on its own merit. So, listen to this:
The CJN told the NEFF delegation “that the agencies conduct shoddy investigations before rushing accused persons to court” and in some cases slap them with “up to 200-count charges…a procedure that makes mockery of the constitution and the law.” Underline the word, shoddy.
The “judiciary,” he said, “is like a builder, and works with materials that are brought to it. As such, the materials necessary must measure up to standard in order to be applied by the courts. Courts cannot carry out investigation and our security agencies must be encouraged to carry out investigation-led and not arrest-led investigation.” Arrest-led investigation amounts to doing before thinking. When you put the cart before the horse, you arrest movement.
No one could have put it better or more courageously. It is possible for some people to dismiss Mohammed’s views as an attempt to defend the judiciary against charges that the courts are to blame for the repeated escape of big men from the clutches of the law. That would be unfair. Mohammed has merely given a weighty voice to what we see and know but have been afraid to voice it.
I have repeatedly said in this newspaper and elsewhere, that despite the corruption in the judiciary, the courts are not entirely to blame each time a former big man dragged before the court with bells and whistles by EFCC on allegations of graft walks out a free man. The anti-graft agencies have consistently shown a disinclination to do well by the law and the people. EFCC compounds its shoddy investigations with fishing expeditions. In the case of former state governors, the commission simply collects all contracts awarded by them and turns them into charges of alleged corruption. As the inimitable Fela would have rightly put in this case, this is yeye and it smells.
The commission and its over-paid hired private lawyers are not prosecuting the war; they are making deals that leave both sides treating bank managers as office assistants. And as the CJN put it, they mock the law and the constitution – and disappoint our expectations.
What to do? We want to see more determined and focused anti-graft agencies. A shake up in order to re-position them seems reasonable. But I believe their problems are so fundamental they cannot be solved with the usual changes in their top personnel. Such changes would amount to cosmetics in the current state of the anti-graft war.
Buhari’s first order of business here should be the restoration of public confidence in these agencies. Their current performances, as the very president knows only too well, are a turn off for the public. Take EFCC, the anti-graft agency in the public eye. Were it not serious it would be funny to see a bunch of police officers run the show in a commission set up primarily to clean up the society. To draw the bulk of the agency’s personnel from an institution that does not enjoy public confidence in matters of fighting corruption and caging the corrupt, is to stretch public credulity.
I suggest that the enabling law of the agency should be amended to make its chairman a retired or serving justice of the court of appeal. It would be his duty to direct proper investigations of petitions before the commission and thus enable the commission to commit to investigation-led arrests. With such an amendment, the agency should be made independent of the ministry of justice and take full responsibilities for what it does or fails to do with its primary brief.
The president should also look into how the agency is funded. In the Jonathan administration the commission complained of being starved of funds to carry out its responsibilities. The decision to starve it of funds, deliberately or not, might not have been unconnected with the president’s political agenda. It might help to put its funding on first charge from the federation account. It seems to me that the commission is suffering what the judiciary went through too. Funding is critical to all organisations. If an agency such as this depends on the executive branch for its funding, it is open to manipulation and misuse at the whims and even caprices of the executive branch. It happened in the recent past when presidents turned the EFCC into an attack dog against real or perceived enemies. The razzmatazz of its first chairman, Nuhu Ribadu, did not escape this stricture in the Obasanjo administration. We cannot make progress in this war by tying the ankles of the agency to the millstone of past mistakes and failures.
The poor prosecution of the anti-graft war has made successive federal and state administrations since General Yakubu Gowon numbered its eradication in his nine-point programme in 1970 look both inept and dishonest. Let us have our Eureka moment in this war under the Buhari administration and end the longest running war in the land.
— Nov 18, 2015 @ 13:30 GMT
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