The EFCC and its useless 1000 convictions

By Rotimi Akinola

EFCC Chairman Ibrahim Lamorde

It was with great joy that I received the Economic Financial Crimes Commission’s (EFCC) news of how it has helped rid Nigeria of unscrupulous elements perpetually tilted towards defrauding their fellow citizens of a seemingly depleting national cash reserve.

Let me use this medium to congratulate EFCC boss Ibrahim Lamorde and his predecessors for succeeding in tracking, arresting, parading, arraigning, prosecuting and convicting nothing less than 1000 fraudsters, cons, bad guys and despicable ladies. Twale!

But let’s get real here, you know that I’m being sarcastic. So the EFCC has achieved a thousand or is it a million convictions? Of whom?

I don’t have time for the “long story” thing today. I’ll just like to ask Mr. Lamorde a few straightforward questions and make some simple requests. Shall we begin?

Mr. EFCC, provided we agree that 1000 case files are easily navigable judging by the entire volume of files actually navigated, could you please publish the names of all the convicted fraudsters?

You may also want to indicate by number and percentage the top politicians who successfully made it to the inglorious list and the length of their sentences. I’ll be glad if we can have just a hundred of those, being the tenth of Nigeria’s anti-corruption returns in EFCC’s ten years of existence.

We are then going to compare the tenth with the 90% who are made up of the frustrated masses who took law into their hands and desecrated the EFCC Act which seems to have been machinated for the sole purpose of permitting power-wielding thieves to keep their loot while at the same time nailing the hapless ones to the cross, condemning them to certain death without any hope of resurrection.

Did I hear you say you cannot come up with that? That’s exactly why I think your 1000 convictions are indicative of a successful decade of anti-graft failure. If a hundred top cons who have sucked, and are sucking, our national milk bank dry are sentenced to long tenures behind bars I’m pretty we wouldn’t be here.

If the EFCC is actually cleaning up Nigeria, I guess it is just about cleaning the mess of the rats who steal chunks of our national cake, defecate around the resultant void, and afterwards walk among us as free men.

Please permit me at this juncture to withdraw the half-hearted congratulations I offered at first and save it within the confines of my patriotic Nigerian spirit where it will become genuinely whole-hearted when I find an anti-sleaze body or warlord worthy of its sacred honour.

This article was originally published by The City Reporters.