On EFCC: When silence is golden

Cthis the season of anomie and you would be right. The Naira is tumbling again in the forex market, with all the dire and adverse consequences it portends for the nation’s economy and the pockets of Nigerians. This Easter, there will be no celebration in many homes. The once-upon-a-time tell-tale signs of festivities are not in the air. The temporary “success” achieved by the CBN as it pumped dollars into the forex market to defend the Naira has abated, vindicating the informed minds who, railing at it, had dismissed it as a fluke. The CBN’s grandstanding was one of the many idiocies and deceits parading as intellectualism and sound judgment. A nation of importers and consumers, in which industries are closing shop in torrents, cannot command a strong currency. Half-way into its tenure, the Muhammadu Buhari administration remains as clueless and incompetent as ever. Its economic recovery plan, the experts have told us, is not likely to revive anything. By the time Buhari is done, this country will be done for with a deluge of debts, foreign and local, with little or nothing tangible to show for it. In the midst of this, the President skipped last Wednesday’s Federal Executive Council meeting, throwing the entire country into the panic mode. Could the President be sick again? Lai Mohammed’s explanations for the President’s absence from the FEC left an apprehensive nation more confused than convinced. What other business of government can be more important, that the President was attending to at home, than the FEC? The other time when Buhari was away on what is now euphemistically referred to as “medical vacation, the same Lai, other presidential spin doctors, and APC oligarchs told the whole world the President was hale and hearty; chatty and humorous but the old man returned and shamed all of them when he confessed he had never been that sick! Why they are again at this ostrich game is what surprises many; even after the President had earlier said he would be returning to London to continue his treatment. If his time is up to return, why not say so and let us see him off with prayers? Coming on the heels of the Presidency’s refusal to disclose the cost of the President’s last medical vacation, another round of hide-and-seek game over Mr. President’s health will be one shenanigan too many. On many fronts, this administration is opaque and disrespectful to its electors. A government that came into office on the wings of popular acclamation has severed the nexus between it and the citizenry. It is hideous in that it picks and chooses which court order to obey – Sambo Dasuki, El-Zackzacky, Nnamdi Kanu, Suswan, Aliyu Babangia. And the list keeps growing! Court orders de-freezing the bank accounts of Gov. Ayo Fayose of Ekiti state and ex-First Lady, Patience Jonathan’s have been observed by government in their breach. When Vice-President Yemi Osinbajo cited the case of United States’ President Donald Trump’s controversial Attorney-General to defend this administration’s inexplicable bewitchment by the EFCC boss, Ibrahim Magu, he deliberately ignored two fundamental truths. First: that as eccentric and cynical as Trump might seem, he obeys court orders. All the court orders shooting down his Executive Orders have been obeyed by him. There in the US, they do not disobey court orders because they will appeal/have appealed or/have filed stay of execution. They first obey and continue to obey while they try to upturn the judgment. Until the judgment is upturned, they continue to obey the subsisting judgment. Why did Osinbajo, a Senior Advocate of Nigeria, ignore that? Secondly, Trump’s Attorney-General or, indeed, any of his other appointees, may have been controversial and the general public may not have wanted them in the post – but they must be cleared by Congress and anyone not cleared cannot step into office and begin to function. Magu failed confirmation twice but he remains in office. That will never happen in the US. The question is not whether Magu is controversial or not but that he has been rejected by the confirming authority. Rather than accept that verdict and search for a replacement, sophistry, legal rigmarole, and demeaning abracadabra have been embarked upon by otherwise responsible and respectable fellows, which is a sad reminder of Chief Richard Akinjide’s twelve-two-thirds “legal mathematics” of 1979 that brought an inept Shehu Shagari into power as first civilian president. We shall soon return to that.

What can we make of the theatre of discoveries and recoveries that the EFCC has regaled us with since the Senate rejected Magu a second time? It surpasses Mungo Park’s and Christopher Columbus’ “discovery” of Africa and the New World! They are just discovering huge sums of money in all manner of currencies left, right, and centre. It is amazing and this is too theatrical to be real. EFCC – or is it Magu – is bending over backward to “prove” that he is working and, therefore, indispensable! Magu is kind of justifying the confidence reposed in him by those trampling the Constitution for his sake. I will tell you a story: As an editor many times over, I had problems each time Crime correspondents came with stories of the police parading “suspects” in crimes involving VIPs. They usually are swift in bursting such crimes but not so when the victims are ordinary citizens. I would ask many questions before using such stories because I doubted their veracity “in toto”. On one occasion, I bluntly refused to use one such story and accused the reporter of being in league with the police. Her explanation ran like this; “Oga, whether the people paraded as the perpetrators of this crime were the actual perpetrators or not, they cannot deny that they are criminals anyway. The officers know the criminals; they have them on their data base sector by sector and gang by gang”. That explanation made a lot of sense then and it still makes today. I am not sure the officers have changed their mode of operation. If you apply this to the recent “discoveries” by Magu’s EFCC, you can draw your own conclusions; same with the face-off between Gov. Nasir el-Rufai of Kaduna state and the National Assembly.

This time around, the governor appears to have bitten more than he can chew. He has met more than his match in the National Assembly that has chosen to remind him of Pentascope. They may also soon remind him of Jimi Lawal, and Abuja Geo-what-have-you. The morals here is as crooned by the Jamaican reggae king, Peter Tosh: “If you live in a glass house don’t throw stones. If you can’t take no stone throw no stone” Just as Gov. Fayose kept telling former President Olusegun Obasanjo that he has no moral right to accuse anyone of corruption – I think that is what the National Assembly is telling the Kaduna governor here; the pot calling the kettle black sort of analogy. El-Rufai has been stirring the hornets’ nest of late; some have said it is because he is preparing for the 2019 presidential election – but he is a first-term governor. His damning letters to Buhari, which were leaked at an inauspicious occasion, has done great damage to that ambition if, in fact, he has any. Now, his unprovoked assault on the National Assembly has backfired, with his faint-hearted efforts at garnering populist sympathy and support discredited. The governor disclosed his monthly salary quite alright but did not disclose his security vote. What he published was the security budget of his state. Even at that, the question to ask is, with the billions allegedly spent by el-Rufai on security, why the pogrom in southern Kaduna? The salaries of public office-holders have always been in the public domain, what is not are the perquisites. As the saying goes, it takes a thief to trace another thief’s footmarks on a rock. Now that the National Assembly has taken the fight to el-Rufai, the governor has to finish the battle he started by publishing his security vote month-by-month since he came into office.

Back to the Vice-President: Did you read his defence of why the administration may want to swim or sink with Magu? Silence would have been golden! Or, if he found it necessary to talk at all, he should simply have said they were minded to keep him in office without embarking on a voyage of legal rigmarole. On a personal level, Osinbajo just lost a chunk of the regard I had for him. And as a government, they sank deeper in the miry clay of public opprobrium. This is a government where the Comptroller-General of Customs loathes Customs’ uniform. It is also a government where the Chairman of EFCC holds office in flagrant disobedience of the EFCC Act. If Senate confirmation was not needed – according to Osinbajo’s later-day interpretation of the Constitution, citing Femi Falana, SAN as authority – why approach the red chamber in the first place, first time and second time? And if the DSS erred in its damning report on Magu first time and second time, even after the President had cleared Magu, why have heads not rolled in that organisation? Magu and the DSS cannot both be right on this issue and Buhari cannot keep both without exposing himself to ridicule. If the EFCC Act falls foul of the Constitution, the reasonable thing to do is to amend it to conform to the Constitution; not keep both and begin to flout one. If you have problems of interpretation, approach the courts rather than usurp the functions and powers of the Judiciary. Before Magu, there were three EFCC bosses and each went through Senate confirmation and before Buhari had been three Presidents; each bowed to the Constitution by respecting the authority of the Senate on this issue. Contrary to Osinbajo’s pedantic logic, the EFCC Act did not run counter to the Constitution but only reinforces it.

Now, mark my word: When the seed of lawlessness and impunity that the Buhari administration is sowing germinates and begins to flourish, it will become a Frankenstein monster that will not only consume the regime itself but also do the entire country in.