Enough is enough!

As elections approach, the electorate faces a particularly important test of judgement. Campaign periods often intensify political competition and create opportunities for candidates to exploit economic hardship, personal loyalties and community expectations. Some candidates may attempt to win support through cash distributions, gifts, promises of personal favours or other inducements. Voters, especially those struggling with rising living costs and limited economic opportunities, may find such offers difficult to resist. Their circumstances deserve empathy rather than condemnation.

Few things in public life sadden a lawyer more than watching the instruments of state deployed in a manner that the law plainly does not permit. In recent times, a disturbing pattern has emerged from the Federal Ministry of Works. With uncomfortable regularity, the Honourable Minister of Works, Engr. David Umahi, has taken to threatening contractors with whom the ministry is in dispute with the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC). Each time I read such a report, I am left wondering whether we have not, without noticing, drifted back into the era of decrees and edicts, when the might of state, rather than the law, settled every quarrel between government and citizen.

The examples are not hard to find. In June this year, while inspecting the Abuja-Lokoja highway with members of the National Assembly Committees on Works, the minister handed contractors a 72-hour ultimatum, warning that, if they were holding government money, they had to bring it out and do the job, or the ministry would go to the police and the EFCC. Before then, on the East-West Road in Rivers State, he had warned that any contractor unwilling to abide by the ministry’s directives would “have the EFCC and ICPC to contend with.” On another occasion, speaking of three contracts awarded in 2023, he announced that the firms concerned “may be facing the EFCC.”

As recent as October 8, 2026, the Punch Newspaper reported the minister again threatenening contractors with the EFCC and the ICPC. The refrain has become so familiar that it now reads less like a warning and more like a standard operating procedure. Let me be clear at the outset. Nobody is holding brief for indolent or fraudulent contractors. Nigerians have suffered for decades from abandoned roads, inflated contracts and mobilisation fees that vanish without a shovel touching the ground. A minister who is impatient with that culture deserves commendation, not condemnation. My quarrel is not with the minister’s zeal; it is with his method. In a constitutional democracy, the end does not justify the means.

The means is the law. Every contract executed between the Federal Ministry of Works and its contractors contains a dispute resolution clause. Typically, it provides a ladder: amicable negotiation, then reference to the engineer or a dispute board, then mediation, and finally arbitration or litigation. These clauses are not decorative. They are products of negotiations, they were drafted by the ministry’s own lawyers, and they bind the ministry as much as they bind the contractor. When a disagreement arises, whether over the pace of work, variation of scope, valuation of certificates, unpaid claims or alleged non-performance, the parties are obliged to walk down that ladder. The contract already provides the answer. There is no need to further burden the anti-corruption agencies with this. They are already groaning under suffocation of pressure.

Nigeria has, in fact, recently strengthened that framework. The Arbitration and Mediation Act 2023 and the equivalents at the sub-regional levels, were enacted precisely to give investors and contractors confidence that commercial disputes will be resolved quickly, impartially and in accordance with agreed procedure. The government that promoted that law is the same government in which the Minister serves. It is a curious thing, then, for a member of that government to treat the agreed mechanism as an inconvenience and to reach instead for the handcuffs. The contract also arms the Ministry with remedies far more potent than any press statement. Where a contractor defaults, the Ministry can issue notices to correct, apply liquidated damages, withhold payment against certificates, terminate for default and re-award the job. Above all, it holds security.

Under the public procurement regime, mobilisation is not released on trust; it is backed by an advance payment guarantee, and performance is secured by a bond issued by a bank or insurer. If a contractor collects mobilisation fee and fails to perform, the remedy is to call in the guarantee or bond. The money is recovered, the public purse is protected, and nobody’s liberty is touched. That is how a lawful government protects public funds. If the Ministry has failed to obtain such security in any contract, the problem lies within the Ministry, not with the EFCC’s jurisdiction. And beyond all of this lies the most ordinary remedy of all: a civil action for breach of contract and damages. The courts are open. Government is entitled to sue like any other party, and it ought to. The position of the law on the use of the EFCC and the police in civil disputes is neither new nor ambiguous.

In Diamond Bank Plc v. Opara, the Supreme Court held that the power conferred on the EFCC by Section 6(b) of its establishment Act to receive complaints and fight financial crimes does not extend to investigation or resolution of disputes arising from simple contracts or civil transactions. In words that ought to be framed on the wall of every ministry, Bage JSC lamented: “Alas! The EFCC is not a debt recovery agency and should refrain from being used as such.” The apex court went further to say that the Commission must scrutinise petitions and advise complainants to pursue the appropriate route for resolving their disputes.

That decision did not stand alone. The Court of Appeal has, in a long line of authorities, condemned the use of law enforcement agencies to coerce the settlement of civil obligations. High Courts, across the federation, have followed suit. An Oyo State High Court in 2021 described attempts by the EFCC to stretch its powers to debt collection as amounting to “meddlesomeness and interloping.” In 2022, the Ikeja Special Offences Court ordered the Commission to stop acting as a debt recovery agency and directed the parties to a civil court. Only this year, the Federal High Court in Abuja declared that the EFCC was not entitled to investigate, resolve or prosecute a contractual dispute between a private company and a federal ministry while that dispute was pending before an international arbitral tribunal. Law Reports are replete with such decisions of courts that I do not intend to bore you with. I do not pretend that the law is that the EFCC can never look at any transaction that began life as a contract.

Where there is credible evidence of fraud, of obtaining money by false pretence, of conversion or diversion of public funds, the Commission is entitled to act, contract or no contract. A Federal High Court said as much in October this year in the dispute between Intels and the Nigerian Ports Authority, while also stressing that the contractual relationship remains governed by the parties’ agreements and their dispute resolution mechanisms. That is precisely the distinction that matters. Fraud is a crime; slow progress, a disputed valuation or a quarrel over variations is not. The question in every case is whether there is evidence of criminal intent, and that question is to be answered by careful investigation, not by a ministerial announcement at a road inspection, delivered before cameras, before any investigation has commenced. Those who dismiss this as mere rhetoric underestimate the harm. When a Minister announces, in the full glare of the media, that a named contractor will be handed over to the EFCC, the verdict has already been delivered in the court of public opinion. Banks reconsider credit lines. Bonding companies grow nervous.

Foreign partners ask awkward questions. A company that took decades to build its reputation can find it dented in a single news cycle, and when the threat turns out to have had no legal basis, there is no equivalent headline to repair the damage. Worse still is what often follows the threat: the invitation that becomes an arrest, the arrest that becomes detention, the detention that becomes a negotiation. Directors of companies are held not because a crime has been established, but in order to extract concessions in what is, at bottom, a commercial disagreement. That is arm-twisting dressed up as anti-corruption work. It violates the right to personal liberty under Section 35 and the right to fair hearing under Section 36 of the Constitution. There is also a practical irony. The Minister wants roads delivered on time, but intimidation does not build roads. A contractor whose directors are dodging arrest and whose bankers are calling in facilities is worse placed, not better, to mobilise to site. Serious firms watching these episodes will quietly stop bidding for federal contracts, leaving a weaker pool of contractors and, ultimately, worse roads at higher prices.

This is the damage done by the threats. The habit of reaching for the EFCC whenever a commercial dispute arises is, in truth, an indictment of more than one Minister. It suggests a lack of confidence in our courts and arbitral processes, an implicit declaration that justice through the law is too slow or too uncertain to be relied upon. It is also an indictment of the government in which the Minister serves.

This administration has spoken repeatedly about attracting investment, improving the ease of doing business and building investor confidence in Nigeria’s legal environment. Those commitments are hollow if a sitting Minister can, at will, convert a contract dispute into a criminal threat. Investors do not read only policy statements; they read the newspapers too. Every threat issued at a road inspection undoes a little of the work done in investment summits abroad. It is simply an indictment of the Government itself. We fought hard as a nation to leave behind an era in which a decree could override a contract, in which a man could be detained on the say-so of a government official, and in which the courts were treated as an obstacle rather than an arbiter.

The essence of civilian, constitutional government is that power is exercised according to law, through institutions, and subject to review. When a public officer prefers threats to process and detention to adjudication, he blurs the very line that separates democracy from what we left behind in 1999. The Minister is seemingly  a man of evident energy, and his frustration with poor performance is understandable. But energy must be channelled through the law, not around it. The rule of law is not a shield for wrongdoers; it is the framework within which wrongdoing is identified and punished fairly. Where a contractor has defaulted, invoke the contract. Where security has been posted, call it in.

Where a claim exists, go to arbitration or to court. Where there is genuine evidence of fraud, by all means, let the appropriate agency investigate, quietly and professionally, without a public trial by press conference. I therefore call on the President and the Attorney-General of the Federation to call the Minister of Works to order. The Federal Executive Council should make it clear, as a matter of policy, that contractual disputes involving ministries, departments and agencies are to be resolved through the mechanisms agreed in the contracts.

The EFCC, for its part, should continue to apply the Supreme Court’s directive by scrutinising petitions arising from ministerial disputes with the same rigour it applies to any other petition, and advising the complainant, however highly placed, to go to court where the matter is civil. And the National Assembly Committees on Works, whose members have stood beside the Minister at some of these inspections, should exercise their oversight functions to insist that public contracts are enforced by lawful means.

Government must lead by example. It cannot demand that citizens obey the law while its own officials treat the law as optional. A Ministry that signs a contract containing an arbitration clause and then threatens the other party with the EFCC is not fighting corruption; it is teaching the public that power, not law, is what really counts. The time has come for this practice to stop. The Minister must follow the rule of law. Enough is enough!