Media Group Tasks EFCC to Expose Looters

Yinka Salaam, Osogbo

A media watch group in Nigeria has called on the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) not to shield any individual or group involved financial crimes in the country.

Muslim Media Watch Group, a non-governmental organization, says exposing them will help the country to get rid of corruption and economic problems bedeviling the country.

The call came on the heels of recent revelations by the chairman of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, Ola Olukoyede that some religious organisations were aiding and abetting corrupt practices and money laundering

At a one-day dialogue with stakeholders in Abuja, the nation’s capital, Olukoyede noted that a particular religious body kept in its account, a sum of N7 billion looted funds.

He added that the particular religious organisation later approached the court to prevent the EFCC from verifying its account.

However, a press statement released by the Muslim Media Watch Group and signed by its National Coordinator Alhaji Ibrahim Abdullahi called on the anti-graft agency to publicly disclose the religious body involved in the criminal act and intensify efforts to retrieve the looted funds.

While commending the EFCC boss for his courage in making the revelation, Abdullah implored him to go the extra mile to disclose the identity of the religious body.

“It is hightime the EFCC initiated amendments into some parts of the nation’s Administration of Criminal Justice (ACJ) whereby, not all economic crimes would be bailable because of dangers inherent in it. it was time for Nigeria to bench-mark bailable economic crimes in Nigeria.”

The media group called for the abolition of Plea Bargain in the legal system, stating that its presence in the Nigeria legal system has encouraged economic crimes, since offenders are only made to refund a certain percentage of the looted funds to get cases against them terminated.

High costs of food

In a related development, the media group has implored President Bola Tinubu to quickly meet and plan with all the state governors, the minister of the Federal Capital Territory and other stakeholders with a view to crashing the food prices via effective distribution process, saying the gains of subsidy removal could be ploughed into food and transportation subsidy to reduce hardship facing the populace.

This he said is better and more effective than sharing the gains of subsidy removal to states at the monthly Federal Account Allocation Committee meetings.

The Group lamented that money shared monthly to state governors are not being felt at the grassroots as the suffering of the masses continued unabated.

It maintained that food items could be subsidised by the government if sold regularly to public servants and pensioners through ministries, departments, agencies and other establishments.

The group noted that hunger is biting hard on Nigerians and called on the federal government to set up a task force on commodities distribution with the involvement of military personnel to control prices of food items to ease the hardship.