The EFCC Wants to Investigate, Hold, and Sell the Same Seized Assets. Last Week's Story Explains Why That Should Worry You.

Last week the EFCC put an unknown number of forfeited vehicles up for sale. Members of the public were invited to inspect them and submit bids through an online platform the commission built, owns, and operates entirely on its own. No independent auctioneer. No outside valuer named in the announcement. Just the agency that investigated the case, seized the cars, and has held them ever since, now also deciding who buys them and at what price.

The Nigeria Association of Auctioneers noticed immediately, and its national president, Benjamin Isibor Abhulimen, said what should have been obvious to everyone else too. Letting a single agency investigate financial crime, seize the resulting assets, keep custody of them, and then run the sale itself is a conflict of roles, not a shortcut. He put it plainly in an interview with Punch: the commission has no legal basis to act as both custodian and seller of assets recovered from suspected criminals.

This is not a new argument for the association to be making. Isibor pointed out that the exact same dispute happened during Ibrahim Magu's time as EFCC chairman, when the commission wanted to bring in foreign firms to handle asset sales directly. The association objected then too, and the plan was abandoned. Nigeria has already had this fight once and apparently settled it. The fact that it is happening again, in a slightly different form, tells you the settlement was never actually written into anything binding. It was just a decision that held until the next chairman decided to try a similar idea from a different angle.

The EFCC's answer, when it eventually gave one, was that the exercise complies with the EFCC Establishment Act, the Public Procurement Act, and the Proceeds of Crime Recovery and Management Act of 2022. I want to pause on that last one, because I wrote about it two issues ago. That is the same law the House of Representatives directed a new committee to review for loopholes, after admitting Nigeria has no working register to track what happens to recovered assets once they change hands. So the commission is now citing, as its legal cover for a self run sale, the very statute the National Assembly has just admitted it cannot confirm is being properly followed anywhere in the system.

That is not a contradiction the EFCC created on its own. It is a gap the whole system left open, and the commission is simply the first agency to walk through it in a way visible enough to make the news.

An agency that investigates, seizes, holds, and sells the same asset is not running an auction. It is running a closed loop, and closed loops do not require anyone outside them to agree that a price was fair. The auctioneers raising this concern have an obvious commercial interest of their own, since a portal the EFCC owns and runs cuts them out of a job they had previously been contracted to do, and Isibor said as much when he mentioned the money auctioneers had already spent building digital platforms under an earlier arrangement with the commission. That interest does not cancel out the argument. It just means two things are true at once. Licensed auctioneers want their business back, and the structural point they are making, that the same body should not both hold an asset and decide its sale price with nobody outside checking the number, happens to be correct regardless of who benefits from fixing it.

Some of the vehicles reportedly involved were recovered during an ongoing investigation connected to the businesswoman Aisha Achimugu. I am not commenting on the underlying case, which has not been concluded. What I am pointing at is narrower. Whatever these vehicles turn out to be worth, and whoever eventually owns them, the process by which the government decided their value and chose their buyer is one that nobody outside the EFCC can currently verify, because the commission has not disclosed how many vehicles are involved, what they are worth, or whether this auction covers all or only part of what it is holding.

This is not the commission's first run at a self managed sale, either. Nigerians raised similar complaints, according to Tribune Online, about an earlier EFCC auction, describing locked platforms, bidders shut out after submitting offers, and prices that struck buyers as inflated. The EFCC acknowledged the complaints at the time. None of that appears to have changed how the commission approaches its next auction. The lesson taken from the last round of complaints was apparently not to add outside verification. It was to run the next one the same way and respond to objections again if they come.

Every fix that gets applied in Nigeria gets applied to the specific scandal that got noticed. Nobody has yet built the standing rule that would make an outside check the default, before the next agency tries the same shortcut in a slightly different shape. The Magu dispute got resolved by public pressure in the moment, and then nothing durable was written down to stop the next chairman from trying again. The House motion on recovered assets, which I wrote about last week, is aimed at exactly this kind of gap. A public register that showed the status, value, and disposal history of every recovered asset would make an arrangement like the current auction impossible to run quietly, because anyone could go and check whether the sale price matched an independent valuation on record.

That register does not exist yet. The committee tasked with designing it has a few weeks left on its clock. Whether this specific auction gets paused while that happens, or whether the vehicles simply sell and the register arrives afterward to describe a transaction nobody can any longer independently verify, is the actual test of whether last week's motion was the start of something or just the newest entry in a long list of admissions that changed nothing.