The anti-graft agency is making a difference

The Economic and Financial Crimes Commission has reported 10,872 convictions and the recovery of N1.233 trillion, $684 million, £373 million and €9.34 during the past three and a half years. It also said it recovered 1,177 real estate assets and other tangible property.

The scale of those recoveries is striking, especially in a country where corruption allegations regularly compete with insecurity for front-page attention. Cash, property, vehicles and precious metals allegedly linked to suspects have often been found in astonishing quantities. Yet many investigations and court cases have eventually stalled or gone nowhere.

That history has shaped public perceptions of the EFCC as an agency associated with media spectacle, publicized arrests and apparent incompetence. Its interim report presents a more substantial record, but it also raises an uncomfortable question: has the commission become better at recovering assets than at securing punishment?

People from whom large sums and assets have been recovered still operate freely in society, while many remain unidentified. The EFCC may therefore have proved effective as a mechanical asset-recovery institution, even as its performance as a law-enforcement and deterrence agency remains uncertain.

The article places much of the problem beyond the commission itself. Politicians convicted of wrongdoing have been pardoned, contested elections and won despite earlier abuses of public trust. Meanwhile, prominent cases have spent years in court without trials beginning. A weak and overstretched judiciary, the article argues, gives experienced defence lawyers opportunities to obtain prolonged delays and questionable injunctions. These political and judicial obstacles continue to limit the impact of the EFCC's work.