President Bola Tinubu has directed the Economic Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) to unfreeze Osun State’s government bank account, just over a week before the state holds its governorship election.
In effect, the president has overruled his own anti-graft agency.
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The freeze had already drawn criticism from Governor Ademola Adeleke, who said it came without a court order and accused the federal government of using its agencies against his administration ahead of a vote it fears losing.
The EFCC, for its part, insisted the action had nothing to do with politics, framing it purely as a response to suspicious transfers out of the state’s account. Tinubu’s statement adds a wrinkle to that account: it says the EFCC obtained a court order on August 5, something neither the EFCC nor Osun had mentioned, and a detail that sits oddly with an agency that had every reason to cite one if it existed.
But the more interesting story here is not really about the president at all. It is about an agency that markets itself as independent and nonpartisan, and what it means that the one office it insists it doesn’t answer to has just had to step in and clean up after it.
An agency exposed by its own defence
Tinubu’s language is measured. He says he is not troubled by the EFCC exercising its mandate, only by the timing, which he directly calls “inauspicious,” and he goes further, warning that nothing should give the impression that a federal agency is being used to interfere with the election.
“Osun State is only a few days away from its gubernatorial election. Therefore, nothing ought to be done to give an impression that the EFCC or indeed any other agency of the federal government is being used to interfere with the election,” the president stated in a statement issued by his spokesperson, Bayo Onanuga.
He is careful to frame the directive as protecting public confidence rather than as a rebuke of the commission’s authority. But it is hard to read his statement as anything other than a rebuke and slapdown of the supposed independent agency going rogue and conspicuously entering the political arena.
Also, the directive says something the EFCC spent its entire statement trying to avoid saying. The commission argued it was acting purely as a financial watchdog, untouched by the Osun election happening around it.
If that were fully true, there would be nothing for the president to vacate. By stepping in specifically because a state election is days away, the presidency has confirmed what many observers already suspected: the EFCC had let itself be seen wading into a political contest, whether or not that was its intention. An anti-corruption agency does not get to claim insulation from politics and then need rescuing from the appearance of playing politics in the same week.
Reasonable people were right
From the moment news of the freeze broke, the reasonable conclusion was that an anti-corruption agency had planted itself in the middle of a governorship race, timing an unexplained financial action to land just before voters went to the polls. Maybe the EFCC gambled that the public would take its claim of nonpartisan independence at face value.
That gamble has not paid off, and the correction has come from the one place the commission cannot dismiss as opposition noise. An agency whose entire credibility rests on being seen as above politics has just needed its own government to walk back its most consequential recent action, days before an election.
FURTHER READING
Whatever the merit of the underlying investigation, the EFCC is the one that put itself in this position, by acting in a way that let a reasonable public, and eventually the presidency itself, read politics into what it insisted was purely procedural.
Philip Ibitoye is a Special Correspondent with EKO HOT BLOG. Click here to find daily analysis and critical insight on trending issues in Lagos and other parts of Nigeria.
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