The Chairman of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC), Ola Olukoyede, says Nigerians condemn corruption yet rally behind corrupt leaders when they are being prosecuted.
Olukoyede said underdevelopment would be a thing of the past if every citizen sees corruption as a common enemy.
“Everybody is crying that Nigerians are corrupt, that the system is corrupt; that corruption is killing us and destroying our system,” he said while receiving officials of the Centre for Crisis Communication (CCC), led by Chris Olukolade, on Friday in Abuja.
According to Olukoyede, collaboration and synergy with the CCC will boost strategic communication and public engagement, adding that public support is crucial to the EFCC’s success.
He stated the EFCC will partner to raise public awareness on its activities and the importance of integrity among Nigerians.
“When we investigate high profile cases and arraign people in court, the same people will carry placards and be supporting corrupt leaders. It doesn’t show that we are serious about this fight. The fight is supposed to be a collaborative effort.
“No single agency can do it alone. It is practically impossible for us as EFCC to fight all the battles. The society has a role to play; policy has a role to play and the issue of welfare of the citizens has a role to play.”
The EFCC boss also spoke on the trajectory of his leadership, saying he has prioritised prevention over enforcement since coming on board.
Besides prevention, the EFCC boss identified the leveraging of intelligence gathering in the work of the Commission as being instrumental to some of the recent mind-blowing successes of the Commission.
“Now we are laying more emphasis on prevention which is a critical aspect of our mandate. We don’t have to always be waiting for money to be stolen before we start working in EFCC. To drive prevention, I established a new directorate called Fraud Risk Assessment and Control, FRAC and now we are doing more of blocking of the leakages.
“We have access to GIFMIS (government payment platform). We want to track and see where every money, released is going. We want to ensure that every capital project is executed. With prevention, we discovered that there will be less to enforce.
“We are not dropping our mandate on enforcement. As a matter of fact, we are scaling it up. But we believe that it is important for us to prevent because it costs less to prevent than to react when the deed must have been done. So that is one of our areas of focus as of now.”