The Executive Chairman of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, EFCC Olukoyede has stated that Nigeria’s under-development would be a thing of the past if everyone begins to see corruption as a common enemy and tackle it.
He stated this on Friday, January 31, 2025 when officials of the Centre for Crisis Communication, CCC, led by the Director of its Board of Trustees, BoT, Major General Chris Olukolade (retd) paid him a courtesy visit at the EFCC corporate headquarters, Abuja.
According to Olukoyede, “One of the major problems in Nigeria which when tackled, will make under-development a thing of the past, is corruption and financial crimes. A society that is ready to move forward is a responsibility not only of the government, but of the citizens.
“This is what has actually led some of us to be very committed to this cause. We are ready to go the whole hog to do what we need to do within the confines and provisions of the law and the power that the Constitution has conferred on us. If everybody makes up his or her mind to do the right thing, we’ll move forward in this country.”
Olukoyede who expressed delight at the proposal of the CCC delegation for collaboration and synergy in the areas of strategic communication and public engagement, re-emphasized that the work and successes of the EFCC run on the wheels of public engagement and advocacy.
“We thank you for proposing a synergy and collaboration with us to support the work we do. One of the strong pillars of our mandate is the issue of public engagement and public advocacy. We will partner with you in that respect. We have so many projects and programmes with respect to letting the public know what we’re doing and we are doing everything possible to ensure that we create awareness on the part of Nigerians with respect to the need for us to be careful and play by the rules.
“However, it is so unfortunate that the same people who approbate also reprobate at the same time. Everybody is crying that Nigerians are corrupt, that the system is corrupt; that corruption is killing us and destroying our system, but when we investigate high profile cases and arraign people in court, the same people will carry placards and be supporting corrupt leaders.
“It doesn’t show that we are serious about this fight. The fight is supposed to be a collaborative effort. No single agency can do it alone. It is practically impossible for us as EFCC to fight all the battles. The society has a role to play; policy has a role to play and the issue of welfare of the citizens has a role to play.”
Speaking on the trajectory of his leadership, he disclosed that he has prioritized prevention over enforcement since coming on board.
“Now we are laying more emphasis on prevention which is a critical aspect of our mandate. We don’t have to always be waiting for money to be stolen before we start working in EFCC.
“To drive prevention, I established a new directorate called Fraud Risk Assessment and Control, FRAC and now we are doing more of blocking of the leakages. We have access to GIFMIS (government payment platform). We want to track and see where every money, released is going. We want to ensure that every capital project is executed. With prevention, we discovered that there will be less to enforce. We are not dropping our mandate on enforcement. As a matter of fact, we are scaling it up. But we believe that it is important for us to prevent because it costs less to prevent than to react when the deed must have been done. So that is one of our areas of focus as of now.”
Besides prevention, the EFCC boss identified the leveraging of intelligence gathering in the work of the Commission as being instrumental to some of the recent mind-blowing successes of the Commission.
“Some of the modest achievements we have recorded, particularly towards the last quarter of last year, have never been done anywhere in the world. Nowhere in the world, and no agency has anywhere made the recovery of one single real estate as large as what we did. It may not necessarily prove that corruption is increasing in Nigeria, but rather shows the proficiency of our system as an agency to track, trace and recover because that property has always been there.
“It shows our proficiency. Most of the work we do now is intelligence-driven. Part of my key policies is that investigation must be intelligence driven. There is the racket we bursted in Lagos that involved 194 foreigners, Chinese, Filipinos, Indians, Tunisians, and Eastern Europeans, perpetrating fraud in Nigeria, using the identity of Nigerians to perpetrate fraud.
“In one single operation 792 were arrested with 184 foreigners. We started in the evening and stayed throughout the night. And there was no single casualty. The Abuja racket of about three or four weeks ago involved over a hundred foreigners. There was also no single casualty, but the one we had in Awka, just one, and everybody went to town as if it was no longer the same agency.
“So we are professional in what we do. We will do the little we can within the capacity and also the resources that are available to us. Operations cannot always be 100 percent perfect. One way or the other there could be casualties. We pledge that we will continue to do what we in the best way to do it.”
EFCC
