Talking vs doing anti-corruption

By Suleiman A. Suleiman

Mon, 5 May 2025 1:23:19 WAT

Let’s begin with a question. What are the most difficult things to do in developing democracies like Nigeria? Experts suggest two answers: managing elections and controlling corruption. There is no gainsaying that Nigeria, like many other developing countries, continues to face serious challenges in each of these areas, even though, hard as it is for some of us to admit, there has been significant progress over time. The problem lies with the nature of these things and how we understand them.

One reason is that both problems involve power or access to it. Elections, for example, provide access to a public office, which can then be used for corrupt self-enrichment. The higher the office, the higher the possibility of corruption, and ultimately, the higher the chances that perpetrators can get away with it. This is why we often talk about “juicy positions” in our politics, government, and the civil service, but also why our elections are often a “do or die affair”, as former President Obasanjo once said. In short, to engage in corruption one must have access to the power entrusted to an office, whether in the public, private or even non-profit sectors.

Yet, controlling corruption can have a lot to do with no official power at all. Consider parents who arrange to have their kids skip a school year or two, or take the kids to another school because they owe school fees to the former school. Consider also the mason who collects money for 100 bags of cement but buys only 80, or the mechanic who sells your own fuel pump back to you and still charges you for his service. Or the drivers who routinely flout traffic rules, or the traditional council which confers a title to a retired official with lots of money but has no way of accounting for it.

Now, would it be easy to control corruption in a country like Nigeria where things like these—and much more—happen all the time? This is the second reason why experts say corruption will remain a difficult problem in countries like ours. Corruption is certainly about the abuse of power. But it is also about social norms which are the prevailing beliefs, attitudes, behaviours and ways of doing things by ordinary people in a society. Social norms are the fertile soil on which official corruption grows, and the same soil on which a society with low levels of corruption can grow.

We Nigerians like to talk a lot about corruption. More than that, we like to hear somebody say they are fighting against corruption. We elect or sack governments because of it. What we don’t do enough is to reflect on what makes controlling corruption so difficult in our context, and why it remains with us even as we fight it. My short answer is that you need more than anti-corruption agencies to do the job. For the EFCC or ICPC to succeed as we hope, other institutions and the prevailing social norms must favoUr them. Do they?

There are two ways to fight corruption: to prevent it from happening, or to detect and punish it when it happens. Either task is daunting. When the ICPC and EFCC were established in the early 2000s, for example, their emphasis was on the second: to investigate cases, collect enough evidence, prosecute the cases in court, and send the offenders to jail. Experience soon showed things are not that simple. As a former Chairman of the EFCC once told me while I was researching these issues more than ten years ago, they did well rounding up the big-time 419rs into jail when they started. And everyone praised them. But the moment they began to go after the politicians and the more politically connected persons, things were never the same again.

The laws have loopholes, the courts have their problems, and the smartest lawyers go with the defense, not with the anti-corruption agencies. And then, of course, because this is Nigeria, the cases are too many, and the resources too few. The legal battles are too long, very expensive and highly uncertain. Even worse, some of the more politically exposed persons facing corruption charges command either electoral support or financial power that even a president would find difficult to overlook.

And in the often politically charged atmosphere such as ours, the media is sometimes used to turn public opinion against the ICPC or EFCC, rather than the suspects facing charges. Above all, the so-called long-suffering Nigerian masses, it turned out, are all against corruption provided it is not happening too close to them. If they stand to benefit, or the alleged offender is somehow connected to them by ethnicity, region, state, religion, or whatever, the matter can become quite complicated. The result? Many big fishes, as you know, passed through the anti-corruption net, not because they were innocent, but because the cases were never determined either way.

In early 2023, I convened and moderated a high-level research panel on anti-corruption performance and its reporting in Nigeria, through the Centre for Media, Policy and Accountability (CMPA), which I lead, with support from the MacArthur Foundation. As Professor Saddiq Radda, then Secretary of the Presidential Advisory Committee on Anti-Corruption (PACAC) told that meeting, over time, EFCC and ICPC, realised that it might yield more anti-corruption dividends to pay attention to corruption prevention and enforcement strategies like asset recoveries.

This means emphasising prevention activities like studying areas of high corruption risks across the government and flagging them, strengthening institutional frameworks to close loopholes, monitoring and tracking public finance in key sectors, public education, partnership and engagement, as well as enforcement of various asset recovery measures and their transparent management. And new laws like the Administration of Criminal Justice Act (2015) and the Proceeds of Crime Act (2022) have both given legal teeth to this new strategy.

The ICPC, in particular, has been quite active in this new direction. In 2019, it launched the Constituency Tracking Initiative to monitor how federal legislators spend their so-called “constituency funds” to cover from the previous four years from 2015. And by 2022, it had added the executive projects to the tracking menu. Last month, it announced plans to move in with the monitoring and tracking of local government funds across all 774 councils in the country the moment the recent Supreme Court ruling on local councils’ funds becomes fully operational.

And as the current chairman, Dr Musa Aliyu (SAN), told me in a chat at a recent event, the ICPC is also looking to build a surveillance mechanism and platform for monitoring the disbursements in the students’ loan scheme, from the NELFUND to universities and other tertiary institutions, and from there to the beneficiary students. In 2024 alone, he said they tracked 1500 constituency and executive projects against a target of 2000; investigated 111 cases, filed 71, concluded prosecution for 65, secured convictions for 43, and ultimately recovered assets worth over N41bn, a performance rate of about 60% against their own target of N70bn
“I am the chairperson of the Interim Steering Council of the African Asset Recovery Practitioners Forum (AARP-Forum), which was launched in Tanzania last year. And I can tell you that all over Africa, anti-corruption authorities are now focusing more on asset recovery, because even though I also go to court sometimes, you know, the controversy is just too much,” he said.
These are but drops in the ocean of corruption in Nigeria, realistically speaking. But they are useful drops still.

Talking vs doing anti-corruption – Daily Trust as Published on Daily Trust