PREMIUM TIMES NG
A ministerial nominee, Lateef Fagbemi, on Wednesday, laid out a broad plan on how to fight corruption in Nigeria.
Mr Fagbemi, a Senior Advocate of Nigeria (SAN), spoke during a ministerial screening at the Senate.
As an accomplished Nigerian lawyer who became a SAN at the age of 37 after a decade of legal practice, Mr Fagbemi will mostly likely become Nigeria’s 24th Attorney-General of the Federation (AGF) and Minister of Justice.
PREMIUM TIMES reported the trajectory of the 64-year-old’s nearly four decades of legal career.
After taking the podium on the floor of the Senate, Mr Fagbemi, accompanied to the Senate by his home state governor of Kwara State, Abdulrahman Abdulrasaq, and seven SANs, responded to a series of questions from the senators bordering on the rule of law and anti-corruption, among others.
The twin problems of breach of the rule of law and widespread corruption plague Nigeria’s democracy.
Against the backdrop of “unexplained source of wealth amongst public servants” in Nigeria, a senator from Borno State, Ali Ndume, asked Mr Fagbemi what he would do if appointed the Attorney-General of the Federation.
Responding to the question, Mr Fagbemi said Nigeria’s approach to tackling corruption “leaves much to be desired.”
He said the “investigation (of corruption cases) should not be handled by the same body” that does prosecution.
“It doesn’t augur well to ask the same authority to investigate and prosecute. That is where we have problems.”
Citing the water-tight investigations carried out by the United States Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) that preceded the arrest and subsequent conviction of a Nigerian international fraudster, Ramon Abbas, widely known as Hushpuppi, who was jailed 11 years for multi-million-dollar fraud last year, Mr Fagbemi recommended that Nigeria’s law enforcement institutions should first carry out thorough investigations before taking in crime suspects.
“My take is that a situation should be created such as the one that happened when Hushpuppi was arrested. They (US authorities) had been trailing him for years, but he didn’t know. Nobody talked to him. But the day they said his time was up, he also knew that his time was up,” he said.
The ministerial nominee berated the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) for arresting former governors immediately after they left office without prior thorough investigations into the suspicious activities of the suspects.
“That is not the way to prosecute criminal matters,” Mr Fagbemi said, suggesting that he would advise President Bola Tinubu to “unbundle the EFCC and the Independent Corrupt Practices and Other Related Offences Commission (ICPC)” to combat corruption effectively.
Urging the senators to enact anti-graft laws without considering how they might be impacted negatively by such legislation, Mr Fagbemi said it was better to have “bad laws administered by good” people “than have good laws administered by bad” people.
