The EFCC Fired 40 Staff for Corruption. A Petition Against One of Its Senior Officers Sat for 66 Days Before Anyone Outside the Building Knew It Existed.

Two weeks ago I gave Ola Olukoyede credit. He had dismissed more than 40 EFCC staff for corruption, put five of them in front of a court, renamed the internal affairs department, and then published a breakdown of where N1.23 trillion in recovered money went. I wrote that credit only goes so far before the limits matter more than the gesture. I did not expect the limits to arrive this quickly.

On July 9, a group called the Network for Justice Association of Nigeria delivered a six page petition to the EFCC chairman. It listed 21 allegations against a serving officer of Assistant Commander rank. Copies went to the Attorney General of the Federation, the Director General of the DSS, the ICPC chairman, and the Code of Conduct Bureau. Then nothing visible happened for 66 days, until PRNigeria obtained the document and published its contents on September 13.

I want to be careful here, and the reporting itself was careful. PRNigeria said plainly it had not independently established the allegations. The petition contains no conviction, no formal finding, no court process. It is a set of claims from a group whose informants asked for anonymity because they feared what would happen to them inside the commission. A petition is not evidence. It is a request that someone go and find evidence. Whether the claims are true is a question for an investigation that, as far as anyone can tell, has not begun.

So I am not going to write about whether the officer did any of it. I am going to write about the 66 days, and about what the petition claims regarding how the officer operates, because that part is a description of a structure rather than an accusation against a person, and structures are what this newsletter is about.

The petition alleges the officer presents himself as the chairman's lifeline. It alleges he bypasses the Head of Operations and the Director of Operations and takes approvals directly from the chairman. It alleges he secures authorisation for petitions without the commission's normal vetting, demands ten percent of the sum at stake before an investigation starts, obtains banking data through contacts in the financial sector and uses it for leverage, holds private meetings with high profile suspects where soft landings get arranged, tells people they are on watchlists when they are not, and interferes with administrative bail in exchange for money. On the asset side it lists duplexes, luxury vehicles, Dubai property, American property, a poultry business flagged as a possible front, and roughly a million dollars in overseas cash transactions including one of $300,000 in June this year. The officer's reported salary sits between N800,000 and N900,000 a month.

Every single one of those claims might be false. But look at the shape of them. Nearly all describe a way of working that only functions if the officer really can get to the chairman directly, and if nobody between them is checking. That is either an invented story about proximity to power or a true one. Either way, it was in the chairman's own inbox for more than two months, copied to four other agencies, and on September 13 the EFCC's spokesman, Dele Oyewale, told the reporter who asked that he was not yet aware of it.

Forty dismissals tell you what an institution does with the people it catches at the bottom. A petition that sits for 66 days tells you what it does when the allegation points upward, toward proximity to the chair. I do not know which of those the EFCC will turn out to be. What I know is that the second test is the only one that matters for the claim Olukoyede made two weeks ago, that nobody in his commission is above scrutiny. A commission can dismiss 40 junior officers and still have a problem at Assistant Commander rank. In fact, that is roughly what you would expect if an internal cleanup were real at one level and cosmetic at another.

There is a second question underneath the first, and Daniel Nduka Okonkwo raised it in Daily Intel two days after the PRNigeria story. Of the 40 people dismissed, five have been charged. What about the other 35. Dismissal ends employment. It does not tell anyone whether the officer's misconduct affected the cases he worked on, whether evidence was handled properly, whether a suspect got a soft landing that never made it into a file, or whether the officer's supervisor knew and signed off anyway. And it does not follow the money. An anti corruption agency that finds one of its own investigators corrupt, terminates him, and does not then open his case files or his bank accounts has done what a private company does with a thieving clerk. It has not done what the EFCC does to everyone else.

I wrote last week about IPPIS, where nearly a billion naira paid to ghost workers was recovered and nobody was charged for creating the ghosts. This is the same pattern from the other side. There, the money came back and the people stayed unnamed. Here, the people got named and dismissed, and the money, the cases, the supervisors, all stayed where they were. Nigeria's institutions keep doing one half of accountability and calling it the whole.

Every chairman the EFCC has ever had left under a cloud. Ribadu was removed in December 2007 after pursuing politically sensitive cases. Waziri was removed in 2011 amid claims of selective prosecution. Lamorde was removed in 2015 while the Senate was probing allegations that recovered assets had been diverted under his watch. Magu was suspended in 2020 after the Salami panel, which found that of 2,446 convictions recorded between 2015 and 2020, only 85 involved high profile or money laundering cases and 2,115 were internet fraud. Bawa was suspended in 2023 and questioned by the DSS. The commission that polices everyone has never once had a chairman leave cleanly. That is not a comment on Olukoyede. It is a description of the office he sits in, and a reason the 66 days matter more than they would anywhere else.

Olukoyede has a real opportunity that none of his predecessors took. He could treat the NJAN petition exactly the way his commission treats a petition against a permanent secretary. Open a file. Assign it to someone outside the officer's chain. Pull the bank records. Check the Dubai and American property claims, which are either easy to confirm or easy to dismiss. Publish the finding either way. If the allegations collapse, the officer gets cleared on the record instead of living under a document that anyone can now read online. If they hold, the chairman will have shown the one thing no EFCC chairman has ever shown, that the cleanup reaches the people who sit close to him.

What I would not accept, and what I suspect is coming, is a third option. The petition gets acknowledged. An internal review is announced. Nothing is published. In six months the officer is still at his desk or quietly transferred, the reporter has moved on, and the 40 dismissals remain the headline figure everyone cites when the question of EFCC integrity comes up. I hope I am wrong about that. I have been writing this newsletter for four months now and I have not yet been wrong about it once.