The challenge before Magu’s EFCC

The launch last week of the “Clean Hands” initiative by the Economic Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) indicates that the anti-corruption agency is beginning to move in the right direction. Any institution set up to combat a prevailing social challenge should realise that the measure of its effectiveness should be in the prevention rather than cure.

The launch of the “Clean Hands” project indicates that EFCC is prepared to embrace a new way of thinking and accept a new interpretation of its role. EFCC is beginning to realise that all the years of ruthless devotion to catching people and throwing them in detentions have hardly dented the huge problem of corruption in Nigeria. With this new initiative, EFCC is bringing preventive advocacy to the heart of its operation. This should be commended.

However, the EFCC is not the National Orientation Agency (NOA) that relies mainly on the power of moral persuasion. Primarily, it is still a crime fighting organisation. Therefore, no matter what it does on the advocacy front, its effectiveness would still be measured principally in its ability to successfully prosecute corruption cases wherever they occur. Apprehension and prosecution as a form of deterrence is, therefore, as important to its work as its prevention activities, if not more important.

Unfortunately, it is in this core area that EFCC has not done very well in the past. Perhaps. But at the moment, EFCC is still widely perceived as a willing attack dog that is readily unleashed on whoever is perceived as the enemy of government. With this persecution bias, it has, therefore, been difficult for the Commission to secure any major conviction based strictly on the rule of law. As a result, its achievement so far has been severely limited to that of naming and shaming, or what is known as media trial.

Rule of law is a fundamental pillar of democracy. Rule of law requires that whoever alleges must prove its case beyond all reasonable doubts. The scale of justice is naturally tilted in favour of the accused. It is necessarily a herculean task for a prosecutor to prove its case and successfully secure a conviction. It would require weeks and months of painstaking and sometimes painful investigations. It would require bodies of evidence that are so scientific in their precision and so compelling in their strength as to leave no iota of reasonable doubts in their wake. What this means, therefore, is that to get its job done, the EFCC must be staffed by some of the finest forensic minds in the country. It means that people who carry out its investigations must know what they are looking for. They must not only be endowed with almost uncanny intelligence, but they must also have a cosmopolitan outlook and a universal knowledge base that understands something about almost everything. They must be obsessively meticulous. They must be slaves to truth, allowing hard facts to lead them wherever it may. Prejudice and political considerations must not have a place in their minds.

If the EFCC would have the courage to look at itself in the mirror, then it is possible that the Commission would come out and say to itself, “we have had a bad outing.” But if it continues to award itself medals of excellence, like I heard Mr. Magu doing last week, then it is not going to learn anything from this experience. Magu was reported to have said that EFCC has secured 140 convictions in six months. I strongly hope he has been misquoted. Otherwise, maybe we should encourage him to publish the list of those convictions in the newspapers.

I believe Magu has the capacity to carry out the difficult task of strengthening this very important institution. Beyond the mass hysteria and the self-celebratory drama of thief-catching, Magu should start immediately to build the necessary institutional support systems across the world that would help to strengthen capacity within the commission. If he needs to recruit new hands, he must not hesitate to do so. Nigeria is populated with smart young men and women who have the necessary exposure, technologically savvy and real intelligence to make the EFCC the kind of anti-crime agency that we all want. Magu should look for them and hire them.

Ibrahim, sociologist and criminologist, writes from Wuse, Abuja, FCT