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| Ola Olukoyede & Tinubu. |
The Senate on Wednesday, October 18, 2023 confirmed the nominations of Mr. Ola Olukoyede and Mr. Muhammad Hammajoda, as Executive Chairman, Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, EFCC and Secretary of the Commission respectively.
Their confirmation came after being screened and allowed
to address the upper legislative chamber at
plenary. Olukoyede identified three focal areas and
raised three posers as important thrusts of plying his new job. The
three focal areas are : focus on the mandate of the EFCC, pursuit of
transparency and accountability and building the image of Nigeria. To
achieve these, he harped on the need for collective responsibility, greater
emphasis on preventive frameworks against graft and premium attention on
transactional credits.
“ We need to reset our focus. Section 6 of the
EFCC Act has given us what an anti-corruption agency should be doing. Number
one, I believe we should be focused on driving economic
development. Number two, we must also create an atmosphere of
transparency and accountability, number three, we must help as an
anti-corruption agency to build the image of Nigeria”, he said.
Continuing, “I also came here with three posers that I
like to share with us. Number one is the need for collective
responsibility. We need to get to a point in Nigeria where we need
to come together on the same page and believe that corruption is a cankerworm
to our development. We must come together and believe that, with the way
financial crimes have overwhelmed our structures and systems in Nigeria, we
can’t move forward and if we move forward, it will be at a snail speed….The
time has come for us to show commitment"
Olukoyede also said that: “”the time has come for us to
begin to look at more of prevention than enforcement. Enforcement is
a very strong tool in our hands, we are going to apply it very
seriously”. He also pointed out that the anti-corruption war
will bite harder with a transactional credit system, arguing that,
“if we allow Nigerians to continue to buy houses and cars with cash, a thousand
EFCC, added to a million ICPC will not do us any good”. The
new EFCC’s boss also called for greater improvement in the criminal justice
system, stressing that, “if we really want to fight corruption…..we
must encourage our criminal justice system to adjudicate in such a way
that, maximum prosecution doesn’t take more than five
years. If we make our criminal justice system works, you will see
more of what the anti-corruption agencies are doing and it will be better for
all of us”.
The Senate, impressed by the articulation of
Olukoyede’s initiatives in driving the anti-corruption war more vibrantly, confirmed
his appointment as a substantive Executive Chairman of the EFCC. It
also confirmed Hammajoda as the Commission’s Secretary.
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