Follow Us on Google
One feat the Olusegun Obasanjo presidency easily flaunted in its first term was the establishment of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC). The EFCC Act, which was first enacted in December 2002 and later replaced by the EFCC (Establishment) Act 2004, was a response to the culture of corruption ravaging the land at the time. In particular, the Act served as response to indictment from the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) on Money Laundering, which named Nigeria as one of the 23 non-cooperative countries in the international community’s efforts to fight the menace.
The functions of the EFCC include investigation of all financial crimes, including advance fee fraud, money laundering, counterfeiting, illegal charge transfers, futures market fraud, fraudulent encashment of negotiable instruments, computer credit fraud and contract scam. It can also identify, trace, freeze, confiscate or seize proceeds derived from terrorist activities, economic and financial crime-related offences or the properties the value of which corresponds to such proceeds.
The initial successes recorded by the commission in reining in advance fee criminals and scammers made its establishment a step in the right direction. With time, however, derailment set in, especially given its perceived willingness to be used in executing vindictive wars against opponents of the government. Consequently, all the past chairmen, beginning with its pioneer chairman, Nuhu Ribadu, Mrs. Farida Waziri, Ibrahim Lamorde, Ibrahim Magu and Abdulrasheed Bawa, left office with the charge of leaving their core assignment and chasing shadows. The current leadership of Ola Olukoyode, a lawyer, seems tailored to that path.
Worst still were the allegations that EFCC operatives, while pretending to be crime busters, had been less transparent in executing their brief. Accusations were that officials of the agency undervalued the assets of convicts slated for public auction and positioned their proxies to buy such properties.
A certain Emmanuel Nwude, convicted of advance-fee fraud, otherwise known as 419, had at a time in a widely-advertised open letter to then President Umaru Yar’Adua, titled “Re: Looting of My Assets By Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) and Its Agents”, published on Monday, December 24, 2007, claimed that the EFCC took possession of his properties and sold them at giveaway prices to those he called the commission’s cronies. The EFCC, of course, put a lie to his claims and presented its own side of the story.
But the findings by the Justice Ayo Salami-led Presidential Committee on Audit of Recovered Assets, which probed Magu’s tenure, may have confirmed allegations of recovered assets being sold to cronies at ridiculously low prices by EFCC operatives. That should have served as wake-up call to the commission. But that does not seem to be the case. The latest controversy involving the commission is its running battle with High Chief Ikechi Emenike, an economist, veteran journalist and politician, who it has forcefully evicted from his Abuja residence that he has been a tenant since 2014.
The commission insists that it had obtained a court order of possession over the property, thus debunking the allegations of disobeying judicial processes. According to the EFCC, Justice Musa Liman granted the order on March 27, 2025, after the commission presented evidence showing that the property was a proceed of unlawful activity by former Petroleum Minister, Mrs. Diezani Allison-Madueke, and had been forfeited to the Federal Government.
“It is not in the character of the EFCC to engage in judicial disobedience,” the commission stated. “We obtained a legitimate order of possession from the court, and there was no misrepresentation of facts before Justice Liman.”
But that is not the true state of affairs, according to Emenike. He is merely a victim of a property in Abuja that the EFCC desperately want to keep. The facts, according to Emenike, are: on September 10, 2014, he leased a five-bedroom detached duplex on No. 6, Aso Drive, Abuja, from Blaid Properties Limited at the sum of N16 million per annum. The agreement, which took effect from December 31, 2014, subsisted until the 2016 when the EFCC listed it as one of the assets recovered from Mrs. Alison-Madueke. On April 13, 2016, Justice Binta Nyako ordered its forfeiture to the Federal Government.
Consequent upon the forfeiture, EFCC appointed Festus Azikagbon & Associates as the new managers of the property and requested Emenike to regularise his occupation of the property with the new manager, based on terms presented to him.
Emenike complied with the directive and entered a new tenancy agreement with the EFCC-appointed manager on January 1, 2017. Thus, the EFCC lied in claiming that while Emenike had a rental agreement with the former minister, he had not been paying rent to the commission for over a decade. On the contrary, Emenike had evidence of continued payment of rent to EFCC’s designated manager until December 31, 2022.
When the commission advertised the property for sale, Emenike indicated interest and subsequently had a meeting with Chairman Bawa on the need to grant him the right of first refusal. The then EFCC boss agreed but promised that they would get back to him after re-evaluating the property.
But while Emenike was waiting for the right of first refusal, EFCC suddenly decided against its own law to appropriate the property to their chairman. Dissatisfied, Emenike sued EFCC. After several months of legal battle, Justice A.H. Musa of the High Court of the FCT ruled that, as a sitting tenant, EFCC should grant the applicant the right of first refusal. That judgement, though appealed by the EFCC, is still subsisting and has not been vacated.
Subsequently, on June 24, 2024, Prince Azikagbon wrote Chief Emenike demanding the payment of outstanding rent. Which amounted to N32,000,000, representing N16,000,000 for the period of January 1, 2023, to December 31, 2023, and N16,000,000 for the period of January 1, 2024, to December 31, 2024.” The letter concluded thus: “Please note that this is a requirement for the purchase of the above mentioned property.” Emenike complied with the demand by raising four bank drafts totalling N32,000,000 on September 13, 2024, in favour of Festus Azikagbon and Associates.
But in a rather unethical move, the EFCC went to a Federal High Court in Abuja on an ex-parte application and secured an eviction order with which they stormed the property and took possession. But when Chief Emenike approached the same court with the facts, the judge, Justice M.S. Liman, reversed the order, carpeted the commission for fraudulently securing the order, ordered the operatives to vacate his residence and restore him to the house. Even the court bailiffs sent to enforce the order were resisted by the EFCC. The commission filed a motion for a stay of execution of the order, which the Court rejected.
The question therefore is why the fixation of the EFCC on the property to the point of serially disobeying valid court orders? The point to be noted is that the EFCC reports to the President. But the current action of the Commission runs contrary to the “Nigerian Ideal” which President Bola Tinubu harped on at his inauguration on May 29, 2023. The Ideal, he said, is more than just an improvement in economic and other statistics but improvement in our way of life in a manner that nurtures our humanity, encourages compassion toward one another.
The EFCC is rather acting in the opposite and in flagrant disregard to due process and rule of law. And to think that such act of highhandedness could be meted to a law-abiding citizen like Chief Ikechi Emenike who was a Pro-Chancellor and Chairman of the Governing Council of the University of Nigeria Nsukka, and whose wife, Dr. Uzoma Emenike, is the first and only Nigerian female ambassador to the U.S, speaks on the extent of the impunity in the system.
