Daily Independent (Lagos)
Maxwell Oditta
2 December 2008
Former Chairman of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC), Mallam Nuhu Ribadu, is fast becoming the butt of common jokes, especially in his homestead. But there are people who feel strongly about the events and incidents around the man who had won for himself the acclaim - especially in the media circles - of the 'anti-corruption czar.'
Among social commentators of all shades, the talk is centred on issues woven around perceived persecution of Ribadu. There are those sympathetic with his travails, and those who believe he should partake of the pie he served others.
His unceremonious removal from the EFCC, sponsorship to the National Institute for Policy and Strategic Studies (NIPSS), Kuru, for a one-year course, his double demotion from the rank of Assistant Inspector-General of Police (AIG), the ignominy with which security agents reportedly buffeted him and his family members during the NIPSS graduation ceremony, and the recent invitation extended to him by the Nigeria Police to face a disciplinary panel, including feelers of his investigation by his successor, Farida Waziri, present a dramatic denouement to the favours previously enjoyed by Ribadu in high places.
The posers raised by those who have taken a keen interest in the plight of Ribadu is whether by acts of deliberate defiance against the rule of law, Ribadu had stirred the hornet's nest and is currently reaping the whirlwind of his own abhorrence of court injunctions. There are those who would not feign surprise that Ribadu seeks legal remedy in his rather controversial demotion by the Parry Osayande-led Police Service Commission (PSC), expressing wonder if, all along, he had ulterior regard for the same laws he flouted in his EFCC days. There are still many more people who are persuaded that he has not overcome his defiance culture evident in his appearing at the NIPSS graduation ceremony in mufti.
Some other persons were however, of the view that the establishment has come down too hard on the former EFCC boss after using him for their own designs, especially in the events leading to the exclusion of some candidates of the opposition parties ahead of the 2007 general election.
Ribadu In The Windmill
Among those who spoke with Daily Independent in terms sympathetic with the plight of Ribadu in this post-Obasanjo era is a chieftain of the Action Congress (AC) in Lagos, Mallam Jaji. The AC chieftain expressed the belief that Ribadu is at liberty to seek recourse to the law court as an aggrieved person.
"Yes, he was at liberty to appear in mufti since he had gone to court to contest his demotion to Deputy Commissioner of Police and the court had then not made a pronouncement on his real status," Jaji said.
Nnimmo Bassey of Environmental Rights Agency/ Friends of the Earth Nigeria (ERA/FoEN) admitted that Ribadu's stewardship at the EFCC left much to be desired. There is, nonetheless, something fishy about his recent treatment, he pointed out. Bassey described Ribadu's travails as messy and capable of painting the country in bad light.
"I believe the entire issues around him clearly show that there is something fishy going on," said Bassey.
"It is true that under him the EFCC was clearly high-handed in some situations. But what is going on does not do the government any justice at all, because every citizen of Nigeria is subject to investigation and prosecution, if they do anything wrong. Ribadu is no exception," said Bassey, a former national secretary of Association of Nigerian Authors (ANA).
National Secretary of Conference of Nigerian Political Parties (CNPP), Osita Okechukwu expands the scope of Ribadu's travails to reflect the stakes of the common man in a regime of doubtful compliance with the rule of law. He portrays Ribadu as an archetype of a Nigerian stranded within the borders of a country under siege. Nigeria is under siege by a local despot, he alleged.
"Ribadu is a minor casualty, whereas Nigerians are the major casualty of an inept, undemocratic and corrupt regime. Nigerians must stand up and resist despotism," Okechukwu said.
For the National Chairman of African Democratic Congress (ADC), Chief Okey Nwosu, Ribadu's demotion from AIG to DC is not tenable.
"I have not heard of anywhere in Nigeria where a new regime comes and says you have been demoted. Who did the promotion? The President? What have they done to the President and the people who did the promotion? Who should suffer it? Is it Nuhu Ribadu? Ribadu's demotion is rascally," opined Nwosu.
In one instance, a Ribadu admirer takes his sympathy for the man and what he stands for, when he said: "History will be on his side." To the National Publicity Secretary of the Alliance for Democracy (AD), Rafiu Salawu, Ribadu is sacrificial lamb of the war against corruption in Nigeria.
"Though he is still in the service, he is a public figure. So, people will show concern about what happens to him. It is the responsibility of the government to tell the people where he has gone wrong. The on-going humiliation sends a wrong signal to the people.
"A public figure is not above the law but the people must be informed of his or her offence. Is it a crime to fight against corruption? This is the question in the minds of the people," said the AD spokesman.
Hoisted In His Own Petard
It is not only opposition politicians that have expressed sentiments in favour of the out-of-favour 'crime fighter.' A chieftain of the ruling Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), Chief Cliff Ogbede, is positive that the treatment being meted out to Ribadu "is not fair." He responded, however, to the didactic aspect of Salawu's poser whether it is a crime to fight corruption, saying that the treatment has one didactic aspect - power is transient.
"The treatment on Nuhu Ribadu is not fair, but still, it is a lesson to those in authority, which states that the only constant thing in life is change. I don't know the sins Nuhu Ribadu committed while in office, but Nigeria should learn how to encourage law enforcement.
"The fight against corruption in Nigeria is undoubtedly a hard one. As such, 10 Ribadus may find it very difficulty to win the war. However, mistakes abound in such circumstance, but we should respect and uphold the ideals of the rule of law for us to succeed as a nation," Ogbede said.
There are still more lessons on the transient nature of power from Chief Umeh Kalu, a Special Assistant on Legal Matters to Governor Theodore Orji of Abia State. Ribadu's present ordeal is a great lesson for those who presently find themselves in positions where they superintend over the affairs of others, Kalu noted.
"Office holders should remain at all times accountable to the people at whose instance they hold power and work with their conscience, being conscious at all times, that there is no permanency in situations. Unfortunately for Nuhu, by the natural course of human affairs, both himself and the only man to whom he regrettably chose to serve, Obasanjo, rather than the nation, has left office, leaving him to bear alone the consequences of his actions whilst in office.
"Nuhu's attempt at appearing in mufti was as a result of his suit challenging his demotion, wearing the rank of Deputy Commissioner of Police will undermine his suit while wearing AIG rank will pitch him further against the Police for insubordination and related offences.
"It is, indeed, an irony that Nuhu who disregarded court orders whilst in office should be seeking courts' protection. However, the courts are there for all citizens including Nuhu, and he should be availed redress and remedies, according to the laws of our land and justice," Kalu said.
From the foregoing, one thing seems certain - Ribadu did not make the best of his EFCC chairmanship. Even many of his sympathisers have not denied that.
A journalist and lawyer, Chris Akiri, who was former AD senatorial candidate in Delta Central and was part of the Delta State think-tank at the 2005 National Political Reforms Conference, chronicled what he considered Ribadu's indiscreet actions concisely in the following words: "After 'happening' him to finish the programme satisfactorily, it was improper to deny him the certificate thereof. NIPSS was stopped from doing so. I must add, however, that although the government is going about the Ribadu matter in awkward manner, I strongly believe that Ribadu is being hoisted in his own petard.
"In articles in the past, I had warned Ribadu against unbridled recklessness, against rancid discrimination in the prosecution of an otherwise decent job, against being overtly teleguided by his appointer, President Obasanjo, to deal with his political enemies - the Vice President, advocates of resource control and opponents of term elongation.
"Nigerians haven't forgotten how Nuhu Ribadu brusquely and illegally removed state governors with brazen disregard for the laws of the land, including the Constitution, the fons et origo of Nigerian legal system. His disobedience of court orders nearly set the judiciary at naught. So, in a sense, Ribadu is reaping what he sowed!"
Already, the Action Congress (AC) has come out to attribute Ribadu's ordeal to retributive justice. While the likes of Nobel laureate, Prof. Wole Soyinka, and Lagos lawyer and former presidential candidate of National Conscience Party (NCP), Chief Gani Fawehinmi (SAN), have flayed the Federal Government over what they perceived as the unjust treatment of Ribadu. Fawehinmi went to the extent of urging President Umar Yar'Adua to resign for being a mere proxy of unseen forces.
Whether those who assert his erstwhile essence in the EFCC saddle or those who vilify and censure him for allowing himself to be used as a tool for achieving political goals by former President Olusegun Obasanjo are justified would be determined by incidences of those four years which some call - and rightly too - Ribadu's antecedents.
Ribadu's Antecedents
EFCC did not exist in Nigeria before 2004, when Obasanjo signed the enabling law. It was established as a law enforcement agency saddled with the responsibility to investigate financial crimes such as advance fee fraud (419), counterfeiting, illegal currency transfer, and fraudulent encashment of negotiable instruments, as well as computer credit card fraud; contract scams and money laundering.
The EFCC Act has 47 sections. The commission was established in partial response to pressure from the international community, particularly the Financial Action Task Force on Money Laundering (FATF). The FATF named Nigeria as one of the 23 countries that had failed to co-operate in the international community's efforts to fight money laundering to a standstill. More so, as at November 2003, Nigerians were reputed as depositors of over $170 billion in overseas banks.
Ribadu was the EFCC helmsman from inception. He reportedly saw his assignment at the EFCC as a man who has gone to join the army. Those who know him closely said he adopted a refrain, which underscored his attitude to work: "It is either they kill you or you kill someone."
Before his present deployment, he had represented the Nigeria Police at the Oputa Panel, a peace and reconciliation committee, which had the mandate to probe human rights abuses under the military, where such warlike pronouncements were the least required. The police authorities may have chosen him as their eye at the panel in their own parochial interest, since Ribadu like most senior police officers, were partakers of some of the most gruesome rights abuses of the military era.
For instance, he was a member of the Failed Banks Tribunal set up by the regime of late General Sani Abacha, a tribunal that ensured the jailing of several bank executives without strict adherence to the rule of law, in the pretext of probing the rot in the banking sector in the mid 1990s.
His appointment as Chairman of EFCC did not come easy. There was opposition, and this hovered around the fact that though an Assistant Commissioner of Police, as he then was, he was seen as too junior to head such a very sensitive agency. What gave him the job, however, was his Aso Rock connection. He was said to have been in the good books of then Vice President Atiku Abubakar and then National Security Adviser, Lt-General Mohammed Aliyu Gusau (rtd). He was outside the country on an official assignment, when they nominated him, as he himself recalled, below.
"I was out of the country. I was on an assignment outside the country. Then, I heard that I was one of the people penciled down for the appointment. I think it was done primarily, because the law itself said the chairman has to be a member of the security service, serving or retired, who will head the commission."
Ribadu's first job would probably have been as an Assistant Secretary at the Corporate Affairs Commission (CAC). He also got job offers at the household items outfit, Pattersons and Zocchonis (PZ) and the United Bank for Africa (UBA). But he left all these because "all these places were not for me. I am not a man who is moved by money or business. I always wanted to serve, a public service kind of job, having come from a public service family. And I believe that is the right place for me to be, and that is where I can get satisfaction of life. I decided to join the police in spite of all family protestations."
The ex-EFCC helmsman was perceived penchant for acting above the law, is believed to have stemmed from the fact that Obasanjo's government in the first place indulged in selective compliance with court orders. Not only did the EFCC continue to detain persons who courts of competent jurisdiction had ordered their release, as in the case of the former National Secretary of the AC, Alhaji Bashir Dalhatu, under him, the act of admitting suspects to bail were practically unknown to the commission, until the advent of the Yar'Adua government, when he soft-pedaled.
The practice (or malpractice) was for the suspect to be remanded either in EFCC or prison custody until his case is disposed of. He was granted bail only when his counsel could prove that he had a perilous health problem. Criminal cases prosecuted by the EFCC in that manner included those of former Bayelsa Governor, Diepreye Alamieyeseigha, Emmanuel Nwude, Ade Alumile (alias Ade Bendel), Fred Ajudua and the sorry story of Morris Ibekwe, a member of the House of Representatives for Okigwe North Federal Constituency, who died in prison custody. These all lend credence to the apparent brutality over which Ribadu presided. Yet, in the Nigerian jurisprudence, all suspects, no matter the gravity of charges against them, can be admitted to bail by a High Court judge.
It is also known to the public, at least through the petition written by Nwude, ex-financial crime convict, to Yar'Adua earlier in the year, that Ribadu's EFCC sold properties of convicts in a manner at variance with the prescriptions of the EFCC Act, allegedly acquiring enormous assets for himself.
More grievous offences against established legal norms were cases of impeachment of serving governors by a fraction of the House of Assembly members of their respective states.
Former governors who suffered such fates were Joshua Dariye of Plateau State, Ayo Fayose of Ekiti, Rasheed Ladoja of Oyo and Alamieyeseigha. These governors were removed from office by a parody of impeachment proceedings, with clearly substantial non-compliance with the Constitution, which stipulates that only two-third of members of the state Assembly can remove a state governor.
The final straw was the shady indictment of some party candidates for the 2007 general election. But for the Supreme Court's last minute intervention, Ribadu's victims would have included his former benefactor, Atiku, who till date has not been arraigned for any economic or financial crime, more than 18 months after he lost his immunity. There was also the case of the businessman, Chief Peter Okocha, whose exclusion from the governorship ballot is before the Court of Appeal, Benin Division? Okocha, it has been said, never held public office, was never protected by any immunity clause and, till date, has not been arrested or prosecuted in connection with any financial or economic crime.
Many governorship and senatorial hopefuls notably of the All Nigerian Peoples Party (ANPP), Progressive Peoples Alliance (PPA) and the AC, were through a suspicious process set up by Ribadu for indictment by a ministerial panel put up by Obasanjo, during the countdown to last year's polls.
Nemesis
With a background of perceived indifference to fairness, it was only natural that with time Ribadu would be exposed to retribution from the mighty toes he stepped on. First, he was removed from the EFCC and sent to the NIPSS for one-year course, a training the Police authorities said he should have gone through before attaining the rank of AIG. Even the media ballyhoo that Ribadu and the Inspector-General of Police (IGP), Mike Okiro, created over the redeployment did not attract any intervention from any higher authority.
Thereafter, Ribadu suffered double demotion in rank. He had actually been raised from AC to AIG by Obasanjo and the IGPs that served under him without the concurrence of the PSC, which represents triple promotion within three years. Okiro alleged that the lopsided promotion of Ribadu, and 139 others created general frustration among senior police officers. Consequently, petitions against the improper promotions were sent to the PSC, which eventually led to demotion of the affected officers.
It is noteworthy that the PSC is chaired by Parry Osayande, a retired Commissioner of Police, who was at the centre of the ignominious exit of one-time Force Public Relations Officer, Superintendent of Police Alozie Ogugbuaja, over supposedly unguided comments on the military, during the Ibrahim Babangida regime. Ogugbuaja had alleged in 1986 that the military did nothing at their officers' mess other than drink beer, eat pepper soup and plan coups. Osayande and members of his committee defended the demotion of Ribadu at the National Assembly.
Ribadu opted for litigation against the Police, a force to which he still belongs, thus exposing himself to what looks like a sure disciplinary action from his employers. Just last week, Yar'Adua had to personally intervene in Ribadu's favour before he was allowed to graduate from the NIPSS. Ribadu, who was on the graduating list of the elite personnel training school, was ordered to leave the venue of the event by the Head of Security of NIPSS and was eventually dragged out. Yar'Adua's intervention came in the face of widespread condemnation of the ugly treatment.
Those events have proved to be mere stanzas in the poesy of how to castrate a bull. In the news at the weekend was that Okiro's invitation to Ribadu, to appear before a disciplinary committee in respect of an earlier query, may be shunned by the former anti-corruption czar.
But the Force Public Relations Officer (FPRO), Akpoebi Agborebi, said that Ribadu's absence from the Police Disciplinary Committee (PDC) would be interpreted to mean admission of guilt, and consequently, the PDC would forward its recommendations to the PSC, which would thereafter discipline him, accordingly.
"He is still a policeman, and a senior officer at that, who knows the law and the implication of flouting such law. I can say that he is playing with suspension," Agborebi said.
Why did Okiro invite Ribadu to face a disciplinary panel, when the suit he filed against the Police has not been disposed of by the court?
Question Of Rule Of Law
That Ribadu held the Constitution, the EFCC Act and other organic laws in contempt in his EFCC days does not excuse any treatment meted out to him in defiance of the same statutory codes, many have however argued. Incidentally, Ribadu cannot seek recourse to any form of redress, except that which widely held as the last bastion of hope for the common man - the Judiciary.
The question of whether the Federal Government's handling of Ribadu fulfils the requirements of the law was addressed by two human rights lawyers, Bamidele Aturu and Ikechukwu Unegbe. While Aturu argued that maintaining the status quo in his demotion suit filed against the Police implied that Ribadu ought to have worn the uniform of an AIG at the NIPSS graduation ceremony and everywhere else, until the court holds to the contrary, Unegbe urged parties to Ribadu's suit to explore quick resolution processes and save the country further embarrassment.
Aturu's stance gives away the Police as the party at crossfire with the law in insisting that Ribadu should wear the disputed rank of DC.
"When a matter is in court including that of Ribadu's demotion, status quo should be maintained," said Aturu. He ought to have worn AIG uniform. Anyway, he wasn't on official assignment at the graduation ceremony," he added.
"It is a very dicey matter because although Ribadu has gone to court, he is still in the service of the Nigerian Police Force," posited Unegbe, adding: "So, the question would then be how do you balance the rights he has as an individual who needs to be protected by the Constitution and laws of the land and then the right and authority of his employers to give him routine directives and instructions as a Nigeria Police service personnel.
"So, he has a right by going to court to challenge the decisions concerning his demotion, and the court can question wither they followed due process, including therefore, whether he was granted fair hearing. But what I am not very sure about now is to what extent Ribadu employed the option of administrative procedures in the Police Service Commission manuals - that is administrative sources of redress. But one cannot be hazarding a guess here because this matter is subjudice."
Unegbe's advice to the parties concerned is that they should explore quick resolution processes because, according to him, the matter is causing embarrassment to the government and it's prone to be misinterpreted as witch-hunt, which may necessarily not be so.
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