EFCC And The Law Enforcement Imperative

By Abdulrasheed Bawa

A law or regulation is only as good as its
enforcement. A society where enforcement is jaundiced or
non-existent is inevitably sucked faster into the black hole of
failure. We are plagued by a situation where the auto-response to
any demand for accountability is to raise doubts about the ‘real’
intentions underlying such a demand, adamant from the outset that
it must be anything but altruistic!

There are so many matters we all agree on in Nigeria. However,
there is perhaps none more so than the fact that Nigeria is a
country of laws. We also coalesce a hundred per cent around the
fact that our bane is the lack of the enforcement of these
laws.

However, this realisation has not served to point us in the
direction of more rigorous enforcement as the best vehicle, at
least for now, to convey us to our El Dorado. Rather, we, again,
almost unanimously, hanker after more laws, which we say would be
better laws to address the same age-old circumstances and emergent
variants of ancient problems.

In our realm of law enforcement, nothing illustrates this, I
think, better than the statement I made some months back, that the
Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) would start
requesting from bankers evidence of their compliance with the Bank
Employees Declaration of Asset Act, 1986.

No sooner had I made this declaration, setting June 1 as the
date we would start requesting the bankers’ confirmation of their
statuses with respect to the provisions of the Act, than all hell
was let loose.

The interventions on that matter made by many otherwise
distinguished ‘public affairs analysts’ did nothing to take away
from the fact that the mentioned law has been in existence for
almost four decades; they did nothing to take anything away from
the fact that even way back then, thirty-five years ago, the
Nigeria we dreamt of building was one in which the guardians of our
private wealth and the public till, those from whom the highest
possible level of professional integrity and moral rectitude was
expected, did not become vehicles of money laundering
themselves.

Furthermore, the avalanche of interventions did not deny the
fact that the law has been comatose until now. Rather, many of the
individuals and sponsored groups who felt pained enough to weigh
in, sought to divert attention and spin a narrative that the EFCC
was overreaching its legal mandate, a position that’s essentially a
rebuke of the EFCC’s raison d’etre.

The work my colleagues and I have been lucky to be called to do
at the EFCC, is essentially to enforce the law, without let or
hindrance, and that is what we will continue do without minding
whose ox is gored. However, another plank of our twin mandate,
which Nigerians do not hear a lot about or do not seem to
appreciate, is that of prevention.

As such, we are charged under the EFCC (Establishment) Act,
2004, to engage appropriate mechanisms to prevent the commission of
economic and financial crimes. This includes engaging with
different stakeholders, and carrying out enlightenment and
sensitisation campaigns, with a view to nipping economic and
financial crimes in the bud.

However, I have always maintained that there is no better
prevention tool than a vigorous enforcement regime, one that is
applied across the board in strict adherence and compliance with
extant laws, rules and regulations.

It is only in the environment of rigorous, unbiased enforcement
under the strict dictates of the law that, I believe, we can move
this nation forward.

Let us face it, those countries we tend to run to, to borrow the
yardsticks for measuring or situating our own collective progress
(or lack of it), are not doing anything extraordinary; in very
plain terms, they enforce their laws and regulations, no matter who
it is that has committed an infraction.

I take it that they have achieved that enforcement nirvana that
makes each and every person to accept that the first and indeed the
only rule for holding public office is to act for the public good
and that when you act contrary to set laws or regulations, you will
be held to account.

The question is, do we need more laws or
regulations? I certainly think we need better, more responsive laws
as veritable guardrails of our march to nationhood. But, whilst we
are hard at work formulating those, the real question begging for
answer is, how much of the functionality of available laws have we,
as Nigerians, tested to hold both public officers and the public
system they run accountable?

In those climes, enforcement is a given, it is a normal course
of action attracted by infraction and not (as we tend to conceive
it here) as some grand witch hunt.

Let us be clear that while focusing on enforcement, principally
from the law enforcement perspective, this is really an issue that
cuts across all facets of our lives as Nigerians. Like white
elephant projects never designed to work, the regard we have for
our laws is that of decorative monuments on our national
landscape.

A law or regulation is only as good as its enforcement. A
society where enforcement is jaundiced or non-existent is
inevitably sucked faster into the black hole of failure. We are
plagued by a situation where the auto-response to any demand for
accountability is to raise doubts about the ‘real’ intentions
underlying such a demand, adamant from the outset that it must be
anything but altruistic!

For a nation whose nationals are almost always on the lookout
for targets to blame for everything considered unfortunate
(notwithstanding that it may be the proper and justified outcome of
a chain of events), the aggregation of society into combative ‘we’
versus ‘them’ columns is very easy.

Thus, the person against whom the law is being legitimately
enforced, sees all enforcement activity and even the person
enforcing the law as extensions of his/her so-called
oppressors.

The tragedy we have confronting us as a nation is that at every
turn, we see our very best in every facet of life either lying
waste or dormant and, as we are wont to say, we prefer instead to
travel all the way to Sokoto in unending quixotic searches for that
which is right here with us in our sokoto!

The question is, do we need more laws or regulations? I
certainly think we need better, more responsive laws as veritable
guardrails of our march to nationhood. But, whilst we are hard at
work formulating those, the real question begging for answer is,
how much of the functionality of available laws have we, as
Nigerians, tested to hold both public officers and the public
system they run accountable? The simple answer from our experience,
when we asked bankers to comply with extant provisions of that very
old law, is sadly not very much.

This is why it so gratifying for those of us at the EFCC to note
that as a Commission, we have deliberately chosen to show
leadership in asking public office holders to account for our
commonwealth that they hold in trust.

In this regard, we make bold to say that no agency of government
in Nigeria has done more to advance the development of the law in
the last 18 years than the EFCC. This is because every day, across
the length and breadth of this country, we are using the
instrumentality of extant laws to hold public officials
accountable.

Apposite examples of the baked-in resistance to law enforcement
are replete on the EFCC’s Facebook page. Recently, as part of the
strategy to use different media to inform and warn against (and
thereby prevent) economic and financial crime, we put up a cartoon
depicting an enforcement activity: The artist’s illustration is
that of a group of internet fraudsters trying to escape with the
EFCC in hot pursuit, discarding in the process their instruments of
‘trade’, including the tell-tale laptop. The reaction of one Ajayi
Abiodun Adeyemi was this:

Please EFCC show us top functionaries in government that looted
our national treasury…not an unemployed youth who unintentionally
engage in internet fraud because he could barely put food on the
table.

He goes further to conclude that, the “EFCC is a classified
reprobate full of intellectual hypocrites.”

Another sampler from one Clinton Ofili says:

EFCC are just groups of legalised looters, bandits, hoodlums,
herdsmen, boko haram, fraudsters, miscellaneous miscreants,
robbers, hired killers, kidnappers, kidney harvesters, organ
harvesters, serial killers, known gunmen….

…there is a lot to expect from all of us and it is
our individual failings to follow through on enforcement processes
that ultimately feed the wrong mass notion that demanding
transparency is a misnomer and that the person demanding it is the
person who has committed a crime.

All these for simply doing our job! We can understand the
wide-held, but wrong supposition that the Commission seems to place
unnecessary premium on the investigation and prosecution of
internet fraudsters to the detriment of the big fraud cases. But
this is not so.

The message that a number of visitors to our social media pages
leave for us to go after those who steal billions of naira with a
single stroke of the pen, is well taken and we have been doing so
since 2003, with numerous trophies and scars of battle to show for
our efforts.

We have, since our inception, been seeking accountability from
politicians of all hues and businessmen of all shades; we have gone
after bankers and public servants. And across the country, from the
High Courts all the way to the Supreme Court, the dockets of courts
are filled with EFCC cases. The laws against cybercrime, which are
markedly different from those criminalising other acts of economic
and financial crime, are only a tiny slate of the laws that the
Commission enforces.

However, because we see a trend where some big entertainment and
social media stars are either into or they glorify internet fraud,
the youth section of the society, who are the greatest consumers of
entertainment and the predominant users of the Internet, tends to
view enforcement activities negatively.

Let me quickly note, however, that they only borrow a leaf from
the older economic and financial criminals who have established
themselves in critical sectors of our public life and big
business.

For those ones, the EFCC is always the agent or lapdog of the
other party; the spiked cudgel of the government in power; the
anti-progress arrowhead and so forth. Rather than give
straightforward answers to the accountability questions we ask
them, they and their hirelings automatically respond in any of
these variety of ways: ‘It is because I am from X region or hold X
religious belief’ or very ridiculously: ‘Why me, why has EFCC not
gone after the other (corrupt person)? At a more dangerous level is
the insistence by the feisty aso ebi-clad kinsmen of an alleged
corrupt former public functionary, that that alleged thief is their
own (beloved thief)!

At court appearances, they come with drummers and singing
troupes to gyrate round court environments and threaten EFCC
operatives and prosecutors. In one instance in 2007, thugs bussed
from hundreds of kilometres away actually pulled down the fence of
the Federal High Court in Kaduna.

Progress will continue to be a mirage for any nation with such a
toxic perception of enforcement activities – be they in respect of
social or business relations or arising from citizens’ engagements
with corporate national or sub-national entities.

Indeed, there is a lot to expect from all of us and it is our
individual failings to follow through on enforcement processes that
ultimately feed the wrong mass notion that demanding transparency
is a misnomer and that the person demanding it is the person who
has committed a crime.

That narrative has to change and it behoves on all of us, in all
our small areas of influence, to make change happen by insisting on
enforcing all rules, all regulations, all laws.

There is also a special role for the media to call out any
individual or agency of government that is not keen on enforcement
or that has a warped sense of it.

It is my conviction that when we all join hands together in this
way, we would have taken a very significant step towards achieving
the Nigeria of our dreams.

Abdulrasheed Bawa is the Chairman of the Economic and Financial
Crimes Commission (EFCC).

This is the text of the remarks made at the PTCIJ Accountability
Roundtable on September 2, in Abuja.

By Abdulrasheed Bawa

A law or regulation is only as good as its
enforcement. A society where enforcement is jaundiced or
non-existent is inevitably sucked faster into the black hole of
failure. We are plagued by a situation where the auto-response to
any demand for accountability is to raise doubts about the ‘real’
intentions underlying such a demand, adamant from the outset that
it must be anything but altruistic!

There are so many matters we all agree on in Nigeria. However,
there is perhaps none more so than the fact that Nigeria is a
country of laws. We also coalesce a hundred per cent around the
fact that our bane is the lack of the enforcement of these
laws.

However, this realisation has not served to point us in the
direction of more rigorous enforcement as the best vehicle, at
least for now, to convey us to our El Dorado. Rather, we, again,
almost unanimously, hanker after more laws, which we say would be
better laws to address the same age-old circumstances and emergent
variants of ancient problems.

In our realm of law enforcement, nothing illustrates this, I
think, better than the statement I made some months back, that the
Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) would start
requesting from bankers evidence of their compliance with the Bank
Employees Declaration of Asset Act, 1986.

No sooner had I made this declaration, setting June 1 as the
date we would start requesting the bankers’ confirmation of their
statuses with respect to the provisions of the Act, than all hell
was let loose.

The interventions on that matter made by many otherwise
distinguished ‘public affairs analysts’ did nothing to take away
from the fact that the mentioned law has been in existence for
almost four decades; they did nothing to take anything away from
the fact that even way back then, thirty-five years ago, the
Nigeria we dreamt of building was one in which the guardians of our
private wealth and the public till, those from whom the highest
possible level of professional integrity and moral rectitude was
expected, did not become vehicles of money laundering
themselves.

Furthermore, the avalanche of interventions did not deny the
fact that the law has been comatose until now. Rather, many of the
individuals and sponsored groups who felt pained enough to weigh
in, sought to divert attention and spin a narrative that the EFCC
was overreaching its legal mandate, a position that’s essentially a
rebuke of the EFCC’s raison d’etre.

The work my colleagues and I have been lucky to be called to do
at the EFCC, is essentially to enforce the law, without let or
hindrance, and that is what we will continue do without minding
whose ox is gored. However, another plank of our twin mandate,
which Nigerians do not hear a lot about or do not seem to
appreciate, is that of prevention.

As such, we are charged under the EFCC (Establishment) Act,
2004, to engage appropriate mechanisms to prevent the commission of
economic and financial crimes. This includes engaging with
different stakeholders, and carrying out enlightenment and
sensitisation campaigns, with a view to nipping economic and
financial crimes in the bud.

However, I have always maintained that there is no better
prevention tool than a vigorous enforcement regime, one that is
applied across the board in strict adherence and compliance with
extant laws, rules and regulations.

It is only in the environment of rigorous, unbiased enforcement
under the strict dictates of the law that, I believe, we can move
this nation forward.

Let us face it, those countries we tend to run to, to borrow the
yardsticks for measuring or situating our own collective progress
(or lack of it), are not doing anything extraordinary; in very
plain terms, they enforce their laws and regulations, no matter who
it is that has committed an infraction.

I take it that they have achieved that enforcement nirvana that
makes each and every person to accept that the first and indeed the
only rule for holding public office is to act for the public good
and that when you act contrary to set laws or regulations, you will
be held to account.

The question is, do we need more laws or
regulations? I certainly think we need better, more responsive laws
as veritable guardrails of our march to nationhood. But, whilst we
are hard at work formulating those, the real question begging for
answer is, how much of the functionality of available laws have we,
as Nigerians, tested to hold both public officers and the public
system they run accountable?

In those climes, enforcement is a given, it is a normal course
of action attracted by infraction and not (as we tend to conceive
it here) as some grand witch hunt.

Let us be clear that while focusing on enforcement, principally
from the law enforcement perspective, this is really an issue that
cuts across all facets of our lives as Nigerians. Like white
elephant projects never designed to work, the regard we have for
our laws is that of decorative monuments on our national
landscape.

A law or regulation is only as good as its enforcement. A
society where enforcement is jaundiced or non-existent is
inevitably sucked faster into the black hole of failure. We are
plagued by a situation where the auto-response to any demand for
accountability is to raise doubts about the ‘real’ intentions
underlying such a demand, adamant from the outset that it must be
anything but altruistic!

For a nation whose nationals are almost always on the lookout
for targets to blame for everything considered unfortunate
(notwithstanding that it may be the proper and justified outcome of
a chain of events), the aggregation of society into combative ‘we’
versus ‘them’ columns is very easy.

Thus, the person against whom the law is being legitimately
enforced, sees all enforcement activity and even the person
enforcing the law as extensions of his/her so-called
oppressors.

The tragedy we have confronting us as a nation is that at every
turn, we see our very best in every facet of life either lying
waste or dormant and, as we are wont to say, we prefer instead to
travel all the way to Sokoto in unending quixotic searches for that
which is right here with us in our sokoto!

The question is, do we need more laws or regulations? I
certainly think we need better, more responsive laws as veritable
guardrails of our march to nationhood. But, whilst we are hard at
work formulating those, the real question begging for answer is,
how much of the functionality of available laws have we, as
Nigerians, tested to hold both public officers and the public
system they run accountable? The simple answer from our experience,
when we asked bankers to comply with extant provisions of that very
old law, is sadly not very much.

This is why it so gratifying for those of us at the EFCC to note
that as a Commission, we have deliberately chosen to show
leadership in asking public office holders to account for our
commonwealth that they hold in trust.

In this regard, we make bold to say that no agency of government
in Nigeria has done more to advance the development of the law in
the last 18 years than the EFCC. This is because every day, across
the length and breadth of this country, we are using the
instrumentality of extant laws to hold public officials
accountable.

Apposite examples of the baked-in resistance to law enforcement
are replete on the EFCC’s Facebook page. Recently, as part of the
strategy to use different media to inform and warn against (and
thereby prevent) economic and financial crime, we put up a cartoon
depicting an enforcement activity: The artist’s illustration is
that of a group of internet fraudsters trying to escape with the
EFCC in hot pursuit, discarding in the process their instruments of
‘trade’, including the tell-tale laptop. The reaction of one Ajayi
Abiodun Adeyemi was this:

Please EFCC show us top functionaries in government that looted
our national treasury…not an unemployed youth who unintentionally
engage in internet fraud because he could barely put food on the
table.

He goes further to conclude that, the “EFCC is a classified
reprobate full of intellectual hypocrites.”

Another sampler from one Clinton Ofili says:

EFCC are just groups of legalised looters, bandits, hoodlums,
herdsmen, boko haram, fraudsters, miscellaneous miscreants,
robbers, hired killers, kidnappers, kidney harvesters, organ
harvesters, serial killers, known gunmen….

…there is a lot to expect from all of us and it is
our individual failings to follow through on enforcement processes
that ultimately feed the wrong mass notion that demanding
transparency is a misnomer and that the person demanding it is the
person who has committed a crime.

All these for simply doing our job! We can understand the
wide-held, but wrong supposition that the Commission seems to place
unnecessary premium on the investigation and prosecution of
internet fraudsters to the detriment of the big fraud cases. But
this is not so.

The message that a number of visitors to our social media pages
leave for us to go after those who steal billions of naira with a
single stroke of the pen, is well taken and we have been doing so
since 2003, with numerous trophies and scars of battle to show for
our efforts.

We have, since our inception, been seeking accountability from
politicians of all hues and businessmen of all shades; we have gone
after bankers and public servants. And across the country, from the
High Courts all the way to the Supreme Court, the dockets of courts
are filled with EFCC cases. The laws against cybercrime, which are
markedly different from those criminalising other acts of economic
and financial crime, are only a tiny slate of the laws that the
Commission enforces.

However, because we see a trend where some big entertainment and
social media stars are either into or they glorify internet fraud,
the youth section of the society, who are the greatest consumers of
entertainment and the predominant users of the Internet, tends to
view enforcement activities negatively.

Let me quickly note, however, that they only borrow a leaf from
the older economic and financial criminals who have established
themselves in critical sectors of our public life and big
business.

For those ones, the EFCC is always the agent or lapdog of the
other party; the spiked cudgel of the government in power; the
anti-progress arrowhead and so forth. Rather than give
straightforward answers to the accountability questions we ask
them, they and their hirelings automatically respond in any of
these variety of ways: ‘It is because I am from X region or hold X
religious belief’ or very ridiculously: ‘Why me, why has EFCC not
gone after the other (corrupt person)? At a more dangerous level is
the insistence by the feisty aso ebi-clad kinsmen of an alleged
corrupt former public functionary, that that alleged thief is their
own (beloved thief)!

At court appearances, they come with drummers and singing
troupes to gyrate round court environments and threaten EFCC
operatives and prosecutors. In one instance in 2007, thugs bussed
from hundreds of kilometres away actually pulled down the fence of
the Federal High Court in Kaduna.

Progress will continue to be a mirage for any nation with such a
toxic perception of enforcement activities – be they in respect of
social or business relations or arising from citizens’ engagements
with corporate national or sub-national entities.

Indeed, there is a lot to expect from all of us and it is our
individual failings to follow through on enforcement processes that
ultimately feed the wrong mass notion that demanding transparency
is a misnomer and that the person demanding it is the person who
has committed a crime.

That narrative has to change and it behoves on all of us, in all
our small areas of influence, to make change happen by insisting on
enforcing all rules, all regulations, all laws.

There is also a special role for the media to call out any
individual or agency of government that is not keen on enforcement
or that has a warped sense of it.

It is my conviction that when we all join hands together in this
way, we would have taken a very significant step towards achieving
the Nigeria of our dreams.

Abdulrasheed Bawa is the Chairman of the Economic and Financial
Crimes Commission (EFCC).

This is the text of the remarks made at the PTCIJ Accountability
Roundtable on September 2, in Abuja.