The EFCC Fired 40 of Its Own Staff for Corruption. Then Its Chairman Did Something This Newsletter Has Been Asking For Since July.

On Monday, EFCC chairman Ola Olukoyede stood before reporters in Abuja and admitted something most agency heads spend their careers avoiding. Since he took office in October 2023, the commission has dismissed more than 40 of its own staff for corruption and financial malpractice. More than five are already facing prosecution. Case files are being prepared against the rest.

You cannot fight corruption while your own hands are soiled with corrupt practices, he said. It is a plain sentence, and I think plain sentences from Nigerian anti corruption officials are rarer than they should be. The commission has renamed its old Department of Internal Affairs to the Department of Ethics and Integrity and introduced a policy requiring officers to declare gifts and hospitality above a certain value, an attempt to stop the exact kind of quiet compromise that turns an investigator into someone worth investigating.

That was not the most interesting part of Monday's briefing. Buried inside what Olukoyede called a 34 month stewardship report was the most detailed public accounting I have seen any Nigerian anti corruption agency give of what actually happens to money after it gets recovered.

The commission recovered N1.23 trillion, $684.48 million, £373,905.78 and €9.34 million between October 2023 and June 2026. Roughly a third of the naira, N397.26 billion, went directly to the Federal Government. The remaining two thirds, N836.34 billion, was returned to ministries, state revenue services, companies, individuals and foreign victims through what the commission describes as recovery and restitution channels. Olukoyede then went further than any Nigerian anti corruption chairman I have covered in this newsletter and disclosed what happened after that. N661.32 billion and $492.37 million were released to beneficiaries. N325.35 billion went directly to individuals and corporate bodies. N335.97 billion went to federal ministries, the Nigerian Revenue Service and state internal revenue services. Federal MDAs alone received N257.2 billion and $126.4 million. Private companies received N350.4 million. Individuals received N1.02 billion.

In July I wrote that Nigeria has been recovering stolen assets since 1999 and could not tell you where any of them are now, because no centralised, publicly accessible register exists to track status, value, location, and eventual use. That absence was not a small technical gap. It was the House of Representatives' own official finding, the reason it ordered a nationwide audit in the first place. What Olukoyede did on Monday is, as far as I can tell, the first time any single agency has voluntarily answered a meaningful slice of that exact question, unprompted, in public, with real figures attached.

An agency volunteering its own numbers once, in a press briefing, is not the same thing as a register the public can check whenever it wants, updated by someone other than the agency being checked. I want to give Olukoyede real credit here, because the specificity is genuinely unusual. Most disclosures I have covered in this newsletter arrived only after a scandal, a lawsuit, or a lawmaker forced the question. This one did not. Nobody was demanding these particular numbers on Monday morning. He gave them anyway.

But credit only goes so far before the limits matter more than the gesture. This is one agency, for one reporting period, describing its own performance in its own words, with no independent party confirming that the shares valued at N1.05 billion actually sold for that amount, or that the insurance policy and Treasury Bills the commission listed among its recovered assets were disposed of the way the briefing implies. The House motion I wrote about in July covers every agency that has ever seized, forfeited, recovered, managed, or disposed of an asset since 1999, not just the EFCC, and not just the last three years. A single chairman's stewardship report, however candid, does not reach the ICPC, the courts, or the security services the original motion was aimed at. It also does not survive a change in leadership. Nothing requires the next chairman to hold a briefing like this one at all.

There is a second number in Monday's disclosure that deserves attention on its own. The commission received 49,673 petitions over the 34 month period and investigated 39,615 of them. It filed 14,476 in court and secured 10,872 convictions, a conviction rate its officials describe as roughly 75 percent of the cases actually filed. That figure is genuinely strong once a case reaches a courtroom. It says less about the roughly 35,000 petitions that did not become a filed case at all. I am not implying those petitions were mishandled. Many petitions are duplicates, weak, or outside the commission's jurisdiction, and a functioning agency is supposed to filter aggressively. I am only noting that a conviction rate calculated on cases filed tells you about the commission's litigation skill, not about what happened to the much larger number of Nigerians who reported something and never learned what became of it.

This is what an answer looks like when the person giving it also controls whether anyone can ever check it against anything else. That is not an accusation against Olukoyede specifically. It is a description of the structure every self reported figure sits inside until an independent register exists to compare it against. The House committee working on that register, which I wrote about seven weeks ago, still has not produced one. Monday's briefing is the closest thing Nigeria currently has to it, and it exists entirely because one chairman chose to be forthcoming, not because any law required him to be.

I keep returning to the same closing thought across this whole thread of stories. Nigeria's institutions are demonstrably capable of transparency when the person running them decides transparency serves them. What the country still does not have is a system that produces the same transparency automatically, regardless of who is in the chair, whether they are inclined to be forthcoming, or whether a scandal happens to be forcing the question that week. Olukoyede gave Nigeria real numbers on Monday because he chose to. The whole point of the register I wrote about in July is that nobody should have to wait on that choice.