Nigeria: Ribadu - Troubadour of a New Breed Politician

31 August 2014

HE could be said to be adept at swimming against the tide. Nature even went further to so package him that he could glide through boulders and crevices without harm to his person. Yet, as the pioneer chairman of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC), Mallam Nuhu Ribadu did many exploits that could not be attributable to a person of such unintimidating bodily frame. Top of that, the wiry Fulani young man from Adamawa seemed to understand what his job at the EFCC entailed. As a lawyer and policeman, he got down on it! But if Ribadu were to be a thespian, he could easily be credited with possessing the flair for accurate interpretation of roles. However his training as a lawyer and later, a police man; carved a different vocation for him. And for a policeman that served variously at Mushin, Apapa, Ajegunle and Alagbon close all in Lagos State, the commercial nerve centre of Nigeria; mounting the saddle as the first Chairman of the then newly created EFCC, made Ribadu a round peg in a round hole.

The general impression from Nigerians about Mallam Nuhu Ribadu's stay on the chair of EFCC was that he gave it his best shot. But the side that was not so complimentary was the allegation that he used his office to track enemies of his benefactor, then President Olusegun Obasanjo, who appointed him and later rewarded him with a promotion given before its due time. It was in his efforts to ward off those accusations of partiality and selective enforcement of mandate that the poet in Ribadu came to the fore. He told journalists that contrary to the allegations of pursuing only Obasanjo's political rivals, it was actually the members of the president's political party that were feeling the heat of the anti-graft war. Most Nigerians received Ribadu's retort as a cheap recourse to ambiguity. This is because some of those who the EFCC chairman targeted, including Governors Joshua Dariye, Lucky Igbinedion and Orji Uzor Kalu, though belonging to the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), were well known critics of the former president. However, despite the spirited attempts to reduce the former EFCC chairman as an attack dog of the president, Ribadu moved against the high and mighty, especially the politically exposed big names that were associated with sleaze. But even in the celebrated bribery case involving the former Governor of Delta State James Ibori, Ribadu left some gaps that left question marks to his many years as a police detective. Here we saw a Ribadu clutching $15m as bribe money without the arrest of the bribe giver.

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