Tunde Bakare
The House of Representatives Committee on Public Accounts has commended the Executive Chairman of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, EFCC, Mr. Ola Olukoyede on the reforms he has instituted in the fight against corruption, economic and financial crimes in the country as well as the new fraud preventive frameworks of the Commission.
The commendation came in Abuja on Friday, October 25, 2024 when the committee members came on a working visit to the Commission at its corporate headquarters.
Speaking on behalf of the committee, its Chairman, Hon Salam Bamidele stated that “Having worked for close to one year now, we felt it is important to reach out to stakeholders, those whose mandate and ours share things in common. We have also observed your leadership of the Commission in the short time within which you have been here, and I must say that we have seen in you a good measure of dedication, commitment and understanding of the issues at stake and the best approaches you employ towards making sure that we remove this blight, this very unfortunate listing of Nigeria in every poor record on transparency, accountability and good governance, all around the world. I know that you have a lot of advocacy that you do, they are very important especially with respect to leadership education,” he said.
Bamidele says that the Public Account Committee of the National Assembly ensures that funds appropriated by the legislature to the various organs of government are applied with probity and accountability on the matters for which they are appropriated. The convergence of EFCC and the Committee’s mandates, according to him, makes synergy and collaboration between the Commission and the Committee imperative.
“There is no way that you will be doing this kind of work and we are doing our own in the National Assembly without us having a synergy. We make laws and have the mandate of oversight and if we find any agency that is working within the ambit of its Establishment Act, it is always good for us to have a deep engagement with them because that is how we will understand their challenges and know the areas where we can collaborate. So we have decided to come and identify with you and to seek a deeper engagement in these respects,” he said.
To ensure probity and accountability in public finances, Bamidele disclosed that the House of Representatives had to give the Audit Bill expedited hearing and passage and transmit to the Senate for concurrence. “What the Audit Bill will do is to ensure that the Office of the Auditor General is empowered not only with more resources but capacity to prevent financial crimes and corruption and violation of compliance from happening. If we are able to do more of prevention, your own burden too in the EFCC would be less. So, we are working to ensure that we have the Audit Bill passed in a manner that would strengthen that office and ensure that we have more preventive measures,” he said.
He expressed regret at the grinding wheel of justice in the country which often sees corruption cases drag endlessly in courts. “We have identified a few gaps in our anti-corruption drive and crusade. One of it is that we have to look at our justice administration system and mechanism of justice administration. If you start a case against somebody who has committed a financial crime and it takes up to 10 to 15 years to determine, it leads to frustration on so many ends. So, working together with other relevant committees of the House, we should be able to see how to improve on our justice administration system in a manner that will make corruption cases to be determined within the shortest possible time, even if it means creating special courts to tackle issues of financial crimes.”
He further identified the problem of abandoned projects in the country as one more issue of concern to the Committee, of which he prayed the EFCC to intervene because of the financial losses such abandoned projects inflict on the country.
“One of the issues that also bothers us as a committee is the issue of abandoned projects in Nigeria. Our records show that we have about 65,000 abandoned projects, littered all over the country. An organization which did an evaluation of them put the amount tied on them at N32 trillion. Some of them are key infrastructure projects; some of them have been paid for 100 per cent. Some of them are funded with loans. We are very bothered about this and we are initiating steps to ensure that we look into some of these abandoned projects and as we get more information and conclude our investigations and submit them to the plenary, the House will be sending them to the EFCC and other law enforcement agencies to take the matters up from there.”
He sued for capacity training, aimed at upskilling members of the Committee on financial infractions by the Commission. “We are also interested in collaboration on capacity building. There is no way that you will have this type of committee that you would not need to be updated on training on trending issues on illicit financial activities for members of the committee in a manner that will make us more productive,” he said.
Olukoyede in his response expressed joy for the engagement, noting that every reform-minded Nigerian knows that the time has come for drastic actions to be taken towards redeeming the country from the vice grip of corruption and its dire consequences. While rallying all Nigerians for the anti-corruption fight, he noted that the Commission cannot do it alone, especially as the fight must be won for the sake of the country’s survival.
“When you take a general overview of what we are passing through in Nigeria you will discover that our major albatross is corruption. The fight against corruption is a battle that must be fought and won if we are to have a country. I would like to say that we all have to do more. All Nigerians have to do much more. As I am talking to you now, I have well over 48000 cases and over 8000 of them are high profile cases.”
Further on the challenges of the Commission, the EFCC boss disclosed that “An average investigator in the Commission handles about 30 to 40 case files,” noting that “a particular prosecutor at some point was prosecuting over 80 cases, moving from one court to the other”, he said.
He disclosed that his emphasis on the primacy of prevention mechanisms in the anti-corruption fight informed his decision to set up the new directorate of Fraud Risk Assessment and Control (FRAC), which focuses on MDAs. “I can’t agree less on the issue of preventive mechanisms. Prevention was what informed my decision upon assumption of office to set up a directorate called Fraud Risk Assessment and Control. Why do I have to wait for money to be stolen and I will be chasing people all over the place? Right now the new directorate has gone into the MDAs, looking at real time release of money tied to projects and evaluating the level of their execution. So we are ready to up our game”, he said.
“Yes we have the enforcement power but the anti-corruption fight takes much more than enforcement powers. Fighting corruption is brain work. Anywhere the fight against corruption succeeds in the world, it was more of brain work, more of preventive actions. We had an engagement in the Villa on Tuesday where we launched our Rapid Response platform against cybercrime and gave a report of our activities in the past one year. We recovered over N260 billion this year in addition to over $75million. And I tell people that I am not too excited with that kind of recovery because by virtue of our experience in asset recovery, for you to recover one naira, N10 must have been stolen. And why can’t I rather prevent that N10 from being stolen? So for us to have recovered over N260 billion, just imagine how much that must have been stolen. This is what makes me sad. Next year, with your support and the support of all reform-minded Nigerians, I should be able to say we recovered less than N20billion because we would have prevented much more from being stolen,” he said.
While bewailing the scourge of corruption further on the country, Olukoyede called on the legislature to do more by way of making stringent laws against corruption, economic and financial crimes.
“I believe in the power of the legislative arm of the government. Can we get to the point where we can say enough is enough. Are you ready to give us a law that says if we discover that you are living above your means of livelihood without asking me to prove it beyond reasonable doubt, that it is deemed that you have stolen money and we take it away from you as proceeds of crime? Are we ready to say that those who have been indicted for corrupt practices still sitting on the Bench, can no longer be tolerated sitting on the Bench? Can we say you ministers and members of the Executive, we want to look into your lifestyles; we want to see what you do with the money that is allocated to your ministries, departments and agencies. Can we say EFCC, all the high profile cases that you have in court, bring them together and let those indicted to bring forth what you have stolen and they will be forfeited? We have to do something drastic.
“Mismanagement of resources, violation of financial regulation and laws have brought us to where we are today. If there is any committee that I would love to work with apart from my Financial Crimes Committee, it is the Public Accounts Committee, because we discover that monies are appropriated but projects are not executed. So we are going to collaborate with you to join us in this crusade. I want to congratulate you on passing the Audit Bill. I pray that the Upper Chamber would give it accelerated passage as well so that the implementation will start as quickly as possible,” he said.
