Nigeria is a jigsaw puzzle. It is a country that has crude oil but cannot refine it. A country where vital electrical equipment needed to enhance power supply are abandoned to rot away for years at the ports. A country where government would threaten to name and shame ghost workers’ and terror sponsors but would not carry out the threat. A country where government goes a-borrowing even when it has assets lying fallow all over the place. We can go on and on listing the country’s queer characteristics.
If the report by Sunday Punch of September 10, 2022, is anything to go by, we can clearly see an aspect of the country’s life that is difficult to explain. According to the report, there are over 2,000 assets seized from politically exposed persons, civil servants and others, that are rotting away. And this at a time the government is facing an acute cash crunch and has resorted to massive borrowing to execute some capital projects!
The items are those recovered by the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC), the Independent Corrupt Practices and other Related Offences Commission (ICPC), Nigeria Customs Service, the Nigeria Police Force and the National Drug Law Enforcement Agency (NDLEA), among others. They were seized from high-profile Nigerians, including a former Chief of Defence Staff, Air Chief Marshal Alex Badeh, former Minister of Petroleum Resources, Diezani Alison-Madueke, etc., following their convictions by competent courts, for corrupt practices.
We are here talking of more than 90 sea vessels, exotic cars, residential and commercial buildings, several fuel-laden tankers, trucks, machinery, phones, laptops, jewellery, furniture, etc. Because of the little or no attention paid to these items, some of them were said or feared to have been re-looted or sold at rockbottom prices to cronies of some highly placed public officials.
For instance, a 2020 report by the Presidential Committee on Audit of Recovered Assets titled, ‘Final Report of the Presidential Investigation Committee on the EFCC Federal Government Recovered Assets and Finances from May 2015 to May 2020’, said that the former chairman of the EFCC, Ibrahim Magu, an assistant inspector-general of police, could not account for 332 out of the 836 recovered properties, in March 2018. The same way he could not tell what happened to the interest generated from cash recoveries by the commission from 2015 to 2020, which must have been quite substantial.
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