Dear Mr. Magu,
This letter is necessitated by issues of urgent national importance, so permit me to jump protocols and get straight to the point. And I assume your permission to pay you the courtesy of being blunt.
You, Mr Ibrahim Mustafa Magu, are a national disaster as EFCC chairman. The anti-graft agency under your leadership has turned to one hell of an entertainment industry. You are now like a mad king who is dancing naked in the market square and being cheered by a large horde of idiots masquerading as his subjects. The tragedy of the situation of this mad king is that he is mistaking the cheers from the crowd as appreciation of his dancing steps but in reality, it is the big size of his manhood dangling in between his leg the dumb crowd is cheering.
Dear Mr. Magu, your anti-graft war is a sham. A farce. A joke and one hell of a terrible lie. In fact, I’m left wondering if it wasn’t your so called anti-graft war Shakespeare’s tragic character, Macbeth, was referring to when he talked about a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, yet signifying nothing.
Just few weeks ago, you appeared before the Senate for your confirmation hearing but when asked how much the EFCC under you has recovered so far, you looked the Senate in the face and responded “I don’t know”.
How can you claim you are recovering monies without knowing the amount you’ve recovered so far? If you don’t know such a basic thing as how much you’ve recovered so far, what else can you possibly know?? Since you don’t know the amount recovered by your agency, how will you know if some of your operatives are helping themselves with the money? In saner clime, sir, that dumb answer is more than enough to disqualify you from holding any public office even without any DSS report. And if your employer, the president, who is our employee, wasn’t such a pathetic excuse for a president himself, he would have sent you back to your village.
Now, in your desperate attempt to convince Nigerians that you are working and compel the Senate to confirm you as the EFCC boss, you’ve elevated arseholery to a national level and even made it an official govt policy.
You now go about discovering millions and billions of orphaned naira and dollars everywhere.
Few weeks ago, you supposedly discovered 45million naira in an open space at the Kaduna airport. The ‘corrupt’ owner of the 45million simply packaged the whole money, Nigerian naira for that matter, and left it at the airport for you to find. Weldone Sir!
Just few days ago, you discovered another orphaned huge sum in a shop somewhere in Lagos.
Still not done with your attempt to take over the entertainment industry from Nollywood, you went to a certain building in Ikoyi and discovered not less than $50million that is still without owner. You mischievousiy leaked the so called discovery to your minions at Sahara Reporters but you couldn’t establish such a simple thing as the owner of the said house even when every property in Lagos is duly registered. Your whistle blower know there was ‘stolen’ money at the apartment but didn’t know the owner of the said apartment or the money. How convenient!
Let me even ask you one question: how far about the millions discovered in the account of Stella Odua’s housemaid, millions discovered in Reuben Abati’s Ugu farm plus all the other millions and billions you’ve been discovering in odd places like pit toilet, Mama Azuka onugbu pot, etc since 2015?
Apart from gifting us with distractions from the calamity that is our President, how many of these so called corrupt people have you convicted in court???
Who exactly are you trying to impress by always leaking details of your ongoing investigation to the press??
Between convicting people on the pages of newspaper and convicting them in the court of law, which one are you after?
After entertaining us with how Dasuki shared billions, how far have you gone with his trial? Have you even established before the court that the money Dasuki shared was from the arms fund and not the PDP campaign fund?? After all the media frenzy, where exactly are you with his trial?
Dear Mr Magu, let me offer you some free piece of advice:
No reasonable person is fooled by this your ‘iweta nke a irie m ego’ show. Nigeria is not made up of over 180million Zombies. You are only deceiving yourself with this your charade.
This is the 21st century, 2017. Everything has gone digital. Corruption, not excluded. If you must succed in fighting corruption, first, you must embark on self reform and self re-orientation. The biggest obstacle to the anti-graft war is you, Mr Ibrahim Magu. Your method is way too archaic and thuggish to achieve any meaningful result. And the tragedy of it all is that some if not most of these corrupt suspects are actually corrupt but they always end up going scot-free because as the prosecutor, you have repeatedly proven that your criminal ineptitude has a NAFDAC approved number.
You must understand that corruption is fought in the court of law with unassailable evidence, not on social media and on the pages of newspapers with market place gossip, speculations and hearsay. Corruption is fought by closing all the loopholes that gift individuals with access to so much money. Corruption is fought by institutions, not individuals. So, please, stop making the EFCC about you as a person. Stop this desperation to secure the post of substantive EFCC chairman!
If you suspect someone of being corrupt, don’t be in a hurry to please the mob and prove that you are working by rushing to arrest the suspect, keep him with you and deny him access to his family and lawyer and use your media allies to convict him in the court of public opinion even when you are yet to establish any case against him. Criminal prosecution requires evidence. Unimpeachable evidence. And when there is even a line of unresolved argument, it is always decided in favour of the accused.
Work more and talk less!
Stop leaking details of your own investigation to the media. By doing so, you are simply jeopardizing your chances of winning those cases in court.
Stop regaling us with tales of how you found millions and billions of orphaned naira and dollars inside some orphaned house and shop in Lagos. Those dollars are new and serially numbered, tracking when and how they came into the country shouldn’t be difficult except you were born dumb.
The whole world is watching us, my dear Magu. Each time, you reel out bogus figures of orphaned monies you recovered without establishing the owner and convicting him/her in court, our friends from outside Nigeria are left wondering whether to pause and die laughing or die crying…….at our gullibility as a people.
Assuming we believe some of these orphaned monies were not planted by your agency, it is still the height of conscientious idiocy to expect us to roll out the drum for you simply for discovering money. Taking possession of orphaned cash is no achievement. Achievement is identifying the owners of the said money, putting him/her behind bars and taking possession of the said cash by convincing the court that the monies actually came from a criminal source.
I assume you are already on your way to discovering another billions, so let me end this here.
Accept my sincerest regard, Mr acting chairman.
Concerned citizen
Charles Ogbu
Charles Ogbu is a social media activist. Connect with him on Facebook.
The opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author.
