The Magu saga and the future of EFCC

Given my professional scepticism, I do not believe everything lawyers trumpet about the innocence of their clients.

It is their duty, right even, to polish the facts, twist the law and convince judges that the white colour does not always look white.

It could look black and still be accepted as white, not by the colour blind but by judges in the intricate business of dispensing justice. After all, as the late Justice Adesuyin, the first chief judge of Benue State, once asked a lawyer in his court: “Is the law about the truth?”

If lawyers loudly protest the innocence of their clients entangled in the spider web of the law, I instinctively reach for my bowl of sea salt and help myself to a large pinch.

It protects me from being sucked into the vortex of facts that are not facts, the irony of justice in search of truth and polished lies that ache the belly.

So, imagine this. Three days ago, as of this writing, I found the sceptical me drawn to the petition to the presidential investigation committee on the alleged mismanagement of EFCC by Ibrahim Magu’s lawyer, Wahab Shittu.

The first sentence that hit me in the petition was this: “The charges against our client are trumped-up allegations designed to tarnish the image and rubbish the credibility and image of EFCC which has been stellar and outstanding under our client’s watch.”

I took a pinch from my bowl of sea salt to steady my nerves for the litany of protestations that would follow by Shitttu to persuade the public that Magu is without stain.

I have heard that many times in the various courts in the land. I also know that despite such lawyerly protestations of innocence of their clients, the prisons are filled with men and women whose protestations of innocence by their lawyers, well paid or poorly paid, failed to wash in the courts of law.

Shittu specifically listed some sixteen allegations against his client. His response to each of them is that it “is outright falsehood and is denied by our client in unmistakable terms.” Sure thing.

As I read them, I began to worry about where the Magu saga would lead the country, not only in the longest-running war in the country, the anti-graft war, but more importantly about these fundamental problems: One, through the long years of military rule, we were fed with the propaganda that agbada is unclean, khaki is clean.

Two, the firm but unfortunate belief that venality among our public officers is the new national creed.

Three, our heightened national appetite for scandals and salacious stories about public officers impaled on the tip of the sword.; this is the transmutation of yesterday’s saints into today’s sinners whose sins are like scarlet.

Magu’s lawyer seems to put the blame for making Magu look like a man painted in coal tar on the news media, always the whipping institution when the mud begins to wash off the muddied.

But he has a point. The orchestration of guilt in the news media often amounts to trial by the news media; something everyone in trouble with the law detests.

I thought some of the allegations are rather too fantastic but with the military propaganda sitting on our psyche as a nation, it is easier to believe, and with some good reasons, such stories than to question them and their source or sources.

This is not about getting at the truth; it is about winning the war of attrition in a dysfunctional administration.

We might pause and ask if we are merely being fed with a diet of lies and falsehood by the press in order to help make the government look good in turning the war commander into an enemy.

I have two fundamental worries about the Magu saga. One, President Buhari has become the central figure in the saga, given the wide and salacious publicity given to Magu’s alleged cases of corruption and perfidy.

If the committee or even eventually, the courts agree with Shittu that his client smells roses, not Ajegunle gutter, and he is set free, the president would find himself carrying the watering can.

He would then be accused of letting off a public thief whose guilt has been proved beyond doubt in the news media.

Two, I fear that Magu’s travails would not lead to some fundamental changes in the structure and the operations of the commission.

We must interrogate a few facts unearthed by the saga, to wit: should the commission be merely a parastatal of the federal ministry of justice or a corporate entity directly responsible to either the presidency or the national assembly?

Sometime ago, someone suggested that the commission should have a board chaired by a retired justice of either the court of appeal or the supreme court to ensure that, as the late CJN, Justice Kutigi once advised, the commission prosecutes on the basis of evidence and not on the basis of investigation attended by so much noise.

Should the head of the commission continue to be drawn from the Nigeria Police?

The Nigeria Police, as we all know too well, is one of the least trusted public institutions in the land.

It is more than an embarrassing irony and it strains belief to accept that the best man to catch high-profile public thieves must be someone from an institution in which money talks and bullshit walks.

The commission recovers huge sums of money from those with soiled hands who miss their way into its net almost every month.

It occasionally announces how much has been recovered from the looters but at no time has the government felt that if you are fighting anti-graft war, accountability should be the watch word.

Consequently, the commission has never accounted for what it recovered nor has the Buhari administration told the public what it has done with the money. It makes eminent sense of the Nigerian public to periodically be informed about the details of the recovered loot. Name-and-shame still works.

Giving the commission the right to lodge the recovered loot in banks of its choice is a clear recipe for the possible re-looting of the loot.

I would think it would be more sensible to create a special account in the CBN into which the commission pays all the recovered loot.

This, in turn, would then be quarterly paid into the federation account and shared among the three tiers of government.

No ant-graft war could be fought successfully fought while by acts of omission, commission or self-interest, loop holes are created so the operatives of the commission could illegally benefit from the prosecution of the war.

This brings me to my second worry and that is my fear that when the dust over Magu settles down, no changes would be made in the structure or the operation of the commission.

The administration would persist in its hollow wisdom that with Magu out of the way, the stain has been removed from the commission and all is well with the anti-graft war.