On June 18 this year, the Attorney-General of the Federation and Minister of Justice, Mr Mohammed Adoke, withdrew a nine-count charge of “dishonestly receiving stolen property and voluntarily assisting in concealing money” the Federal Government had instituted against Mohammed Abacha, son of a former Head of State, the late Gen. Sani Abacha.

The Federal Government had, in February 2014, preferred against Abacha charges of unlawfully receiving about N446.3bn allegedly stolen from government’s coffers between 1995 and 1998. The fresh charges replaced an earlier 121-count charge government had preferred against him. Adoke hinged government’s excuse for the withdrawal of the new charges on the emergence of “fresh facts” that, he argued, made continuation of the case unnecessary.
Abacha had been absent in court on two earlier occasions that government had tried to arraign him. But he showed up the Wednesday that private prosecuting counsel, Mr Daniel Enwelum, informed the court of Adoke’s instruction to discontinue the case.
The withdrawal marks yet another death of a high-profile case of corruption under prosecution by the Federal Government or its anti-corruption agency, the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC). There has been widespread criticism of the Federal Government’s withdrawal of the charges, with many critics alleging that President Goodluck Jonathan mother-hens high profile corruption suspects as he spreads his net wide for strong support for his touted re-election in 2015.
Ribadu is believed till now to have done a good job investigating alleged corrupt practices against top political and public officers, against many of whom he prepared case files and even initiated prosecution in courts. But the cases have lingered and the present administration has not been seen to show the will to pursue them to legal conclusions.
Annual budgets the Jonathan administration has been voting for the EFCC have been dwindling, an act many analysts have decried as calculated to cripple the agency in fighting the corruption scourge, especially against influential suspects who enjoy government friendship and have the financial means to drag cases no end. It gets worse with the stark fact that the president himself has accorded the suspects the exit route, either through withdrawal or pardon.
There, indeed, have been many cases of corruption preferred against top political and public officers by the EFCC which have been hanging for many years. Some high-profile corruption cases filed since the tenures of former chairpersons of the EFCC, Malam Nuhu Ribadu and Madam Farida Waziri remain at plea stages or undecided through prosecutor/defence counsel shenanigans. The cases have been no deterrence whatsoever to the suspects, with many of them continuing to play key roles in politics and business. Some suspects have gone on to become state governors and senators, an example is the current Ekiti state governor AYO FAYOSE.
There have been allegations against the President Jonathan administration that it is politicising the fight against corruption with a view to gaining electoral advantage. Many analysts have been condemning the dwindling federal allocations to anti-corruption agencies in the last four years to buttress the claim that the president is deliberately killing the anti-corruption war.
A report prepared this year by a group of civil society organizations comprising CLEEN Foundation (Nigeria), Partners for Democratic Change (United States), Campaign for Good Governance (Sierra Leone), Institute for War and Peace Reporting (United States) and BudgIT (Nigeria) exposed what it maintained is the Nigerian federal government’s unwillingness to cage corruption. The report examined the low-level budgetary appropriations in the last three years to the three anti-corruption agencies – the EFCC, Independent Corrupt Practices and other Related Offences Commission (ICPC) and the Code of Conduct Bureau (CCB), in comparison with huge appropriations to other areas like the Niger Delta Ministry and the Niger Delta Amnesty programme. The report revealed that the 2014 capital budget of the three key anti-corruption agencies totalling N2.5 billion is just a little over the N2 billion allocated to the Ministry of Information from SURE –P funds to publicise the interventionist agency’s activities.
The budgets of the three agencies, a Cleen Foundation report read, for the three years have also been less than half – in some cases less than a quarter – of the allocations to the Niger Delta ministry. In 2012, the three agencies received less than N20 billion as against about N65 billion for the Amnesty Programme and about N60 billion for the Niger Delta ministry.
In 2013, the agencies received even less than the previous year compared to over N60 billion budgeted for the Amnesty Programme and the Niger Delta Ministry respectively.
Observed the report: “The budget of the three agencies combined is less than half the budget of the Ministry of Niger Delta at N111bn or the N100bn allocated to National Assembly for constituency projects without details on how the funds will be spent.”
The report further described as ridiculous the entire budget of a fourth agency, the Code of Conduct Tribunal, CCT, whose entire budget of N512m in 2014 is less than the N568m which the Ministry of Finance will spend on mere honorarium and sitting allowances in the same year.
In the 2011 fiscal year, government allocated N13.8 billion to the EFCC for its operations. That figure, however, declined to N10.6 billion in 2012 and N9.8 billion last year. It has marginally risen to N10.2 billion in 2014.
For the ICPC, the funding figures have been N3.6 billion in 2011, N4bn in 2012, N4.5 billion in 2013 and N4.6 billion in 2014. Government gave the CCB N1.4 billion in 2011, N3.9bn in 2012, N2.9 billion in 2013 and N2.8 billion in the current year. The CCT has been barely surviving, with fundings of N359.6 million in 2011, N461.2 million in 2012, N517.1 million in 2013 and N512.6 million this year.
The civil rights organisations saw these funding patterns as “worrying”. The organisations thought that with the “increase in the trends of corruption in the country, it would have been expected that the funding of these agencies would improve over time rather than decline, as the case is presently.”
The report was emphatic that government’s allocations to the anti-corruption agencies smack of its “insincerity in fighting corruption” as the funds are “inadequate in addressing the magnitude of corruption in the country.” The agencies, it stated, are challenged by the enormity of cases and the daring nature of some of the cases,” it stated.
Another civil society group, the Socio-Economic Rights and Accountability Project, SERAP, using Nigeria’s retrogression in the Transparency International’s global Corruption Perception Index (CPI) as “a reality check”, also stressed that the country’s fight against corruption has lost track,
[b]Speaker of the House of Representatives, Aminu Tambuwal, has been vocal in accusing the President Jonathan administration of not serious in tackling corruption. Last December, the Speaker declared that the president’s “body language doesn’t tend to support the fight against corruption.”