Nigeria's Anti Corruption Agencies Asked for a Whistleblower Law Again on Wednesday. They Have Been Asking Since 2016.

On Wednesday in Abuja, a room full of people who spend their working lives on corruption agreed on something. The Code of Conduct Bureau chairman was there in person. The EFCC and ICPC chairmen each sent a director. BudgIT, CISLAC, CODE, ANEEJ and AFRICMIL sat on the panels. The former head of the West African money laundering body gave the keynote. And at the end of the first session, the panel said out loud what all of them already knew, that it is embarrassing for Nigeria to still have no whistleblower protection law when Ghana, Liberia and Senegal all have one.

I wrote about this in June, in the fourth issue of this newsletter, under the title Why Nigeria's Whistleblower Protection Bill Keeps Dying in Committee. I want to be honest about what has changed in the three months since. Nothing. The bill has not moved. The workshop on Wednesday was not a new development. It was the same call, made by the same kind of people, in the same city, that has been made at intervals since December 2016, when the Buhari government introduced a whistleblowing policy with a reward attached and no protection behind it.

The policy worked, briefly, in the way that a reward works. In its first year it produced billions of naira in recoveries from tips. Then the people who had provided the tips started losing their jobs, and the cases that were supposed to follow the recoveries mostly did not, and the flow of tips slowed. What was missing then is what is missing now. A whistleblower in Nigeria has a portal to report through and a percentage to hope for. What they do not have is a statute that makes it unlawful to sack them, prosecute them, or send police to their house for having reported.

Here is the part of Wednesday's reporting I keep coming back to. The Senate passed a whistleblower bill in March 2022. That is a fact people forget, and the reason they forget it is instructive. A bill passed by one chamber needs the other chamber to concur and the president to sign. Neither happened before the ninth National Assembly ended in June 2023, and when an Assembly ends in Nigeria, every bill still in the pipeline dies with it. The 2022 bill did not get voted down. It simply ran out of calendar. A fresh version was listed in the tenth Assembly in 2023. Premium Times, in its reporting on Wednesday's workshop, could find no record that it has gone anywhere.

So the honest description of Nigeria's whistleblower law is not that it was rejected. It is that it has never been important enough to anyone with a vote to finish. That is a different problem from opposition, and it needs a different kind of pressure. Opposition can be argued with. Indifference cannot. It can only be made expensive.

Nigeria's whistleblower bill was never voted down. It just kept running out of calendar. I spend a lot of this newsletter on institutions that do not check what they are supposed to check, and this is the same failure in a different room. The National Assembly has had a bill in front of it, in one form or another, for most of a decade. What it has not had is anyone who pays a price for leaving it unfinished. The agencies asking for the law on Wednesday cannot pass it. The civil society groups cannot pass it. The reporting on the workshop names no legislator on any panel. The people who can act were not the people in the room, which has been true of every version of this event I can find.

I want to connect this to what I wrote last week, because the connection is not abstract. The petition against a senior EFCC officer that surfaced on September 13 was built on information from people inside the commission. Those people, according to the petition, asked for anonymity because they feared victimisation. Read that again with Wednesday in mind. Individuals working inside Nigeria's lead anti corruption agency believed they could not safely report alleged corruption inside that agency, to that agency, without hiding who they were. The EFCC sent a director to a workshop about whistleblower protection eleven days later. Nobody at the workshop, as far as the reporting shows, mentioned the petition.

That is the whole case for the law, and it is not a hypothetical. Almost every story in this newsletter that mattered started with someone deciding to talk. A businessman named Gbenga Collins told a House committee how a fake agency took N400 million from him. A budget official told ICPC investigators he had never read his own department's rulebook. Anonymous EFCC staff told a petitioner what they had seen. The fake agency itself only surfaced because a man facing arrest started making accusations. In every case the information moved before any law protected the person moving it, and in every case that person took a risk the state has spent ten years declining to cover.

There is a version of this argument that gets made at the treaty level, and I have made it elsewhere. Article 33 of the UN Convention against Corruption, which Nigeria ratified in 2004, asks states to consider protecting people who report corruption in good faith. Consider is the operative word. It is not a hard obligation, and Nigeria has spent two decades treating a soft one as optional. Ghana did not. Its Whistleblower Act dates from 2006. Liberia passed its law in 2021. Nigeria, with an anti corruption architecture larger than either, has the policy, the portal, the reward scheme, the annual workshop, and the bill. It does not have the law.

Nigeria has the policy, the portal, the reward scheme, the annual workshop, and the bill. It has had them for years. What it does not have is the one thing that would make any of the rest safe to use. Abdullahi Shehu, the former GIABA director general who gave Wednesday's keynote, listed twelve priorities for the country's anti corruption framework, and protection for whistleblowers and witnesses was one of them. He also said something about recovered assets that belongs in this newsletter, that recovering money only to return it to a system where it can be stolen again defeats the point. I have written that sentence, in different words, in at least four issues. It was good to hear a former regulator say it from a podium in Abuja.

What would actually move this is not another workshop. It is a named senator, on the record, with a date. The tenth Assembly bill has a number. Someone in the Senate sponsored it. Someone in the House would need to concur. The civil society groups that organised Wednesday know exactly who those people are, and so does every agency that sent a director. A workshop that ends with a communique addressed to the National Assembly in general is a workshop that has decided, in advance, not to make anyone in particular uncomfortable.

I said in June that this bill keeps dying in committee. I would revise that now. It does not die in committee. Committee is just where it happens to be standing when the Assembly ends and it expires. The next Assembly is due in 2027. If the bill is not law by then, it will run out of calendar for a third time, and in 2028 or 2029 the same organisations will hold the same workshop, the same agencies will send the same directors, and somebody will say, again, that it is embarrassing. They will be right, and it will not matter, because the people it should embarrass will not be in the room.