The EFCC Says Stolen Money Could Decide the 2027 Elections. Two of the Ruling Party's Senate Candidates Are Under EFCC Investigation.

On Wednesday, at a roundtable on electoral reform in Abuja, the EFCC sent a senior operative to say something the commission has clearly been thinking about. Drug money, stolen public funds and the proceeds of internet fraud, he said, are being used to fund elections in Nigeria, and if nothing changes, the richest person on the ballot rather than the most popular one will end up winning. He also described EFCC operatives being attacked at polling units, not by hired thugs but by voters who had just been paid.

I think he is right about all of it. I also think the commission does not need to speculate about where illicit money might enter the 2027 contest. It has two case files that say where to look, and the men named in them are already on the ballot.

Ifeanyi Okowa governed Delta State for eight years. Earlier this year the EFCC arrested him over what it says is N1.3 trillion in oil derivation funds it cannot account for between 2015 and 2023. He then left the PDP, on whose ticket he had run for vice president in 2023, and joined the APC alongside his successor and most of the state's political establishment. In May the APC cleared him for its Senate primary for Delta North. He won it. Yahaya Bello, who governed Kogi for eight years and is currently on trial for money laundering after a long and public refusal to submit to arrest, was cleared by the same party for Kogi Central. He won that one too.

Two weeks ago a recording surfaced that most outlets have been careful to call purported. In it, a voice attributed to Senate President Godswill Akpabio, in a conversation with a woman named Sandra Duru, says Okowa came into the APC because of fears over his corruption cases and not out of sincerity, and claims credit for helping him secure the Delta North ticket. I cannot verify that recording. Nobody writing about it can. Akpabio has not, as far as I can find, confirmed or denied it. So I am going to set the tape aside, because the argument does not need it.

Without the tape, the documented sequence is this. Arrest. Defection to the ruling party. Clearance by that party. Victory in its primary. Endorsement by the ethnic nationality of his home area for a Senate seat. And through all of it, the EFCC saying, whenever asked, that the investigation is ongoing. Okowa reportedly visited the commission's Lagos office in June. The EFCC has stated that changing parties confers no immunity. That is true. It is also the problem, because an investigation that is ongoing in October 2026, into conduct that ended in 2023, can remain ongoing through the 2027 election, through a four year Senate term, and through the one after that. Nothing in Nigerian law requires it to conclude.

An open investigation is not a sanction. For a man on the ballot it is a filing cabinet with his name on the front, and the EFCC has thousands of them. On September 26, Olukoyede told an audience he receives more than 20,000 petitions a year on public corruption, and that some of the case files would make you weep. I believe him. The commission is not short of files. What it is short of, and what it has been short of since 2003, is concluded cases against people with the resources to wait the system out. I wrote in June, in issue 006, about the Dataphyte analysis showing cases against elected officials taking six to fifteen years while cases against appointed officials close in two to five. Kalu took twelve. A Senate candidate under investigation in 2026 is, on that record, a sitting senator under investigation in 2031.

I want to be fair to both men, because the fairness is part of the argument. Neither has been convicted of anything. Both are entitled to the presumption of innocence and both are legally entitled to run. Senators have no immunity under Section 308, which covers only presidents and governors, so neither is seeking a constitutional shield. I am not arguing they should be barred. I am arguing that the phrase ongoing investigation is doing a specific job here, and every party to the arrangement benefits from it. The EFCC gets to say it has not dropped anything. The APC gets its candidate. The candidate gets his ticket and, if he wins, a legislative calendar, a bloc, and a prosecutor whose chairman is appointed and removable by the leader of his party. The public gets a sentence that will still be accurate in five years.

There is also the question of who did the clearing. A political party can screen its candidates on anything it chooses. The APC's screening committee looked at a man the EFCC had arrested months earlier and another the EFCC was prosecuting in open court, and found nothing to stop either of them. No law required it to. There is also no law requiring the EFCC to finish before polling day. So the two things that could have changed the outcome, a party rule or a concluded prosecution, do not exist, and the commission that spent Wednesday warning about illicit money in elections sits inside a structure that cannot act on its own warning in time for the election it was warning about.

The EFCC is right that illicit money could decide who sits in the next Senate. What it did not say on Wednesday is what it intends to do, before polling day, about the two candidates it already has files on. I wrote in Africa Is a Country in August about the EFCC's founding statute, which gives the president power to appoint and remove its chairman, and about how few nationally prominent political figures the commission has ever convicted across more than two decades. The two facts are connected. A commission that answers to the president cannot easily conclude a case against a candidate of the president's party in the run up to the president's own election, and nobody expects it to. That expectation is the whole mechanism. It does not require anyone to make a phone call.

Six weeks ago I wrote about Adeleke in Osun, who sued the EFCC, won his election, and withdrew the suit within hours. The question of whether the commission had acted lawfully simply stopped being asked. This is the same shape, running the other way. There the question closed because the person asking it got what he wanted. Here the question stays open because keeping it open is what everyone with power wants. In both cases the thing that would settle it, a judge ruling on the record, is the one thing nobody with the standing to demand it has any reason to.

Wednesday's warning was accurate. It was also incomplete. The EFCC does not have to guess where stolen money might enter the 2027 contest. It has two files that say where to look, and the people in those files have already been cleared by the party of the president who appoints the EFCC chairman. Whether those files close before polling day, or after, or ever, is the only part of Wednesday's warning that was actually within the commission's power to do something about. It did not mention that part.