MAGU: Senate to amend EFCC law amid jostle to replace anti-graft commission boss

STRONG indications emerged at the weekend that once it resumes from break in January, the National Assembly may revisit the law setting up the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, EFCC, to expand the qualifications of the Chairman.

Meantime, following Senate’s rejection of the confirmation of the Acting Chairman of the EFCC, Ibrahim Magu, on Thursday, after the report from the Department of State Security Service, DSS, an intense lobby has begun in the Presidency on who occupies the position. Sunday Vanguard gathered, yesterday, that there are already suggestions from top Presidency officials and close associates of President Muhammadu Buhari that the President should look beyond the police in making a new appointment.

It is being suggested that the President can pick a new EFCC Chairman from the intelligence community, the legal profession, the military or other law enforcement bodies provided the person selected is clean and ready to pursue the Buhari government’s anti-corruption agenda without fear or favour.

According to a source, the lobbyists believe that the EFCC should be returned to the era where it used to have intellectual, investigative and prosecutorial wisdom to carry out its assignment as well as relate with similar agencies around the world.

Ibrahim Magu

The suggestions that the agency had derailed and became like the police force deploying mere physical brute force without forensic and intellectual content led to the speculations that the President may be considering dragging a former EFCC Chairman back to the job.

The source said, “We need a seasoned head who can take that agency to the level of anti-money trafficking unit of the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) and its equivalent in the UK. The agency needs international connection and it must operate at a higher pedestal than it must be functioning become money laundering and corruption are practiced without borders. It doesn’t have to be a policeman all the time.”

In a related development, it is being suggested that the National Assembly should revisit the law setting up the commission with a view to adopting the first position under President Olusegun Obasanjo ensured that the EFCC Chairman should be a person who must not be less than the rank of Assistant Inspector General of Police.

The law, it is being said, ought also to set out other qualifications which the person to head such a sensitive anti-graft agency must possess while spelling out a code of operations and other requirements that would give leadership to the anti corruption war.

Meanwhile, Chairman, League of Patriotic Lawyers and former President, Students Union, University of Benin, Abubakar Yesufu, has described the non – confirmation of Magu by the Senate as wicked, mischievous and self-serving.

Yesufu said the rejection has put a heavy moral burden on the Senate. “It is now crystalclear that senate wants a pliable, character to head the crimes commission”.

He enjoined all human rights group to stand with Magu and condemns this evil rejection and urge the senate to reconsider its anti-peoples stand and warned that plans may be afoot to occupy the National Assembly if this evil rejection is not rescinded”, he told journalists in Lagos, yesterday.