We need institutions, not individuals to fight corruption —Oshoma

Liborous Oshoma is a Lagos-based legal practitioner. He spoke to AYOMIDE OWONIBI on the state of the anti-graft war in the wake of unfolding allegations against the Secretary to the Government of the Federation, Babachir Lawal and the acting Chairman of Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC), Ibrahim Magu. He insists that corruption war should be prosecuted using institutions and not just individuals. Excerpts:

HOW do you see the government’s anti-corruption fight in view of recent revelations against the key officials of government by the Senate?

My concern really is that we are resorting to approaches without proper planning. I expected a departure from all of those same approaches to issues. I expected us to be more strategic. If you say Nigeria is corrupt, we don’t have institutions and we want to now begin to fight corruption, shouldn’t we build institutions first? Start the reformation of The Nigeria Police, for example and find a way of making the police a truly Nigerian police that will now begin to fight the everyday corruption. It is the corruption between you and I that will graduate to the very big ones. And rather than this fixation on the EFCC, and now that you have an acting EFCC boss with accusations against him, who will investigate him? Is it the EFCC or the police?

The president is setting up committees to investigate. The president is asking the Attorney-General of the Federation to look into the matter, who is the Attorney-General going to use to look into the matter? Is it the EFCC or the police or DSS? So, there is confusion. Does that mean that once there is any allegation against a minister or against any big person now, you set up a panel to probe them, instead of activating the police to investigate? You don’t need to look at the president’s body language. Once the allegations are in public domain, the police ordinarily should swing into action and begin to gather evidence and facts.

But a situation where we still do it the same old way is not acceptable. We look at the president’s body language until the president says look into it and then you look into it. If he doesn’t want to do anything with the report, you cannot even go ahead and prosecute. So, it’s the same old way we have been doing it and I really don’t see any departure. That is why some people say if Buhari leaves tomorrow, we are back to the same spot. To me, the anti-corruption fight is more of a slogan than action because I expected us to build institutions. For the EFCC, it looks like only Magu can do the job. Once he goes, there is nobody again. We are not looking at the institution itself. We are looking at the person and we can’t grow like that; we can’t fight anything like that.

Are you saying Nigeria is not fighting the war against corruption under the present administration?

What we have now is that the president is the one fighting corruption; it is not a systemic thing. What we will have at the end of the day is to get back to square one. If necessary reforms are not made then, I’m sorry, it’s going to be business as usual at the end of this administration.