More than 40 staff members of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) have been dismissed for corruption and financial malpractice in the past three years, the commission’s chairman, Ola Olukoyede, has said.
Olukoyede disclosed this on Monday, August 31, at the EFCC headquarters in Abuja during a briefing on the achievements of the commission under his leadership.
He said the anti-graft agency had also commenced the prosecution of more than five of the affected staff members. “In the past two and a half years or three years of my service, I’ve asked them to dismiss over 40 staff on account of corruption and financial malpractice. More than five of them are being prosecuted at the moment,” Olukoyede said.
He said the decision to prosecute staff accused of wrongdoing was necessary to ensure that the commission applied the same standards internally as it did when investigating and prosecuting corruption cases involving members of the public. “Because if that is what people do in other agencies and I arrest them, I investigate them, I prosecute them, why must I just dismiss you if you do it within our own system and I’m not prosecuting you?”
The EFCC chairman said some of the affected personnel were already facing prosecution, while case files involving others were being prepared for prosecution. “You can follow those cases in court; they are public knowledge,” he said.
Olukoyede also disclosed that the commission had renamed its erstwhile Department of Internal Affairs as the Department of Ethics and Integrity. He said the change was intended to reflect the commission’s commitment to “internal cleansing”.
The EFCC chairman said the commission had also designed a gift policy for its personnel as part of measures to strengthen accountability and prevent conflicts of interest within the agency. According to him, staff members would be required to declare assets above a specified threshold, including gifts received from relatives abroad.
He said the commission would determine the types of gifts its personnel could accept, adding that the policy would help ensure that staff members could account for their means of livelihood and standard of living. “You must be sure that your hands are clean. You can’t be fighting corruption when your hands are soiled with corrupt practices,” Olukoyede added.