A raid gone awry
The raid mounted by the Nigeria Police ten days ago on the Asokoro, Abuja home of former Gombe State governor Senator Mohammed Danjuma Goje is the strangest and so far the least successful raid to retrieve public funds from houses and secret hideouts of public figures in this Anti-Corruption era. The raid spectacularly backfired and […]
The raid mounted by the Nigeria Police ten days ago on the Asokoro, Abuja home of former Gombe State governor Senator Mohammed Danjuma Goje is the strangest and so far the least successful raid to retrieve public funds from houses and secret hideouts of public figures in this Anti-Corruption era. The raid spectacularly backfired and this could have consequences for future raids. While the EFCC made amazing finds at Mr. Andrew Yakubu’s decrepit property at Sabon Tasha and at NIA’s Ikoyi “safe house” and walked away with its head held high, the police walked away from the raid on Goje’s house with its tail between its legs. It blamed an unnamed whistleblower for misleading it.
When news first broke on the afternoon of April 20 that Goje’s house was being raided, everyone thought it was EFCC but its acting chairman Ibrahim Magu denied that his agency was involved. This was confusing. Insofar as most EFCC agents are policemen, the only visible difference is that EFCC agents wear red jackets with the agency’s name emblazoned on it. The number of raids to recover suspected stolen wealth has gone up noticeably since the government’s lucrative whistleblower program was unrolled. EFCC is the agency mainly in charge of financial crimes and money laundering.
However, the Department of State Services [DSS] tried to grab a piece of the action when it raided the homes of Supreme Court judges last year. If two can play the game, Nigeria Police thought three can play it as well.
For a while it looked like police was looking for something other than money, since it is broadly responsible for crime prevention. For the next five days, unlike the media savvy EFCC, police neither arrested Goje nor revealed what it found in his house. It proved to be a costly mistake. Danjuma Goje is one of the toughest, shrewdest, most relentless and most ambitious politicians in Northern Nigeria. He also happens to be the Chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee, which is in the thick of compiling the 2017 federal budget. To worsen matters, the committee was billed to table its report before the Senate last Tuesday, for possible passage on Wednesday and quick transmission to the President afterwards. Getting the long delayed budget passed is the Buhari Administration’s top priority at this time and Goje is the main guy to get it passed. The police could not have chosen a worse time to tackle such a dangerous foe.
On Wednesday last week, Goje made his move. With fellow senators cheering him on, he stood up at the Senate plenary and apologised for the Appropriation Committee’s inability to table the budget because the police raided his house and carted away budget documents. Both Senate and House of Representatives immediately set up ad hoc committees to probe the raid and they demanded that the police must return the budget documents. It was the worst possible blackmail and it left the police high command scrambling for an answer.
Early the next day, Nigeria Police issued a statement denying that it removed budget documents from Goje’s house.
Describing the reports as “false, misleading and capable of misinforming Nigerians about the statutory roles and duties of the Nigeria Police Force,” the Force spokesman listed the items he said it “recovered” from Goje’s house. They include ₦18m, $19,850 and 9,400 Saudi Riyals in cash as well as 38 files and six envelopes “containing documents.” The police did not mention a laptop computer, which Goje mentioned on the Senate floor and which was likely to contain the budget documents.
The first problem with the recovery was that the cash is not impressive. Compared to the $10m EFCC found at Sabon Tasha and the $40m it found at Ikoyi, this one is chicken feed.
Nor was it against the run of play, to borrow Segun Adeniyi’s phrase, because big men and women in Nigeria tend to keep large amounts of money in their houses. This is particularly true of politicians. The Central Bank of Nigeria’s [CBN] cashless policy is still in its infancy and ATM machines’ daily limit of N100,000 is far too small for the daily needs of a big Nigerian. Danjuma Goje is a veritable big man, a long standing businessman, a former minister, a former two term governor and a serving senator. Nor was it surprising that he kept some Riyals because in the North in this season, a politician’s supporters often come to wish him goodbye before they proceed on the lesser hajj. The Riyals come in handy.
In these difficult times in Nigeria when too many homes do not have the next day’s bus fare, N18m at home could look like a big amount. The problem is that the authorities have not yet told us the limit to the cash that anyone can keep at home.
The assumption is that amounts of money beyond a certain level kept outside the banking system are probably from illegal sources. That is probably true, but not in all cases.
Before security agencies mount a raid, it is very important to be reasonably sure of their source. The whistleblower policy has been of tremendous help so far to the anti-graft campaign but given the greed it has elicited in many poor Nigerians, it is only a matter of time before someone blows the whistle for a foul when the players are off the field for half time.
It looks like this was what happened in this case. Senate President Bukola Saraki said at plenary on Wednesday that the Chairman of Senate’s Police Affairs Committee told him that the police said they were misled by a whistleblower.
Every Nigerian has heard the mouth-watering reward that awaits a whistleblower. This is the time to hear, and see, the severe sanctions that await a failed whistleblower. It is not everybody that can be a successful whistle blower. You must have been taken into confidence by the looter before you can know precisely where the loot is kept. Any aspiring whistleblower that stands down the road from a big man’s house, sees Ghana Must Go bags being unloaded and blows the whistle should be prepared to pay the price for a false alarm.
The police statement said they heard that a large amount of money was about to be moved from Goje’s house. Why didn’t they mount surveillance? Or better still, why didn’t they tell EFCC? Many Nigerians do not think the police have the moral standing to raid people’s homes looking for loot because if we raid the pockets of every policeman manning a checkpoint, we could find more loot there. The police however hit back at Goje by revealing the titles of the files found in his home. One of them is already causing trouble.
Police described it as “A file containing write-ups on how Governor Shekarau plotted the assassination of Sheikh Jafaru Adam.” Some groups quickly pounced on it and said Goje may be a suspect in the Sheikh’s murder, while Malam Ibrahim Shekarau reportedly demanded an inquiry. But hold it; police said “a write up on” the allegation. Since there were many write ups in 2007 making that allegation, what Goje had in the file could be just a newspaper article. That explains why the police did not arrest and charge him to court for being an accessory to murder.
On Thursday afternoon, police announced that it returned all the items to Goje in a move apparently ordered by the presidency. The President’s SSA on Senate Ita Enang said the matter is being amicably resolved so that the budget could be passed. In other words, the police’s sloppiness jeopardised passage of the 2017 budget and forced Buhari’s men to cave in to the senators. One more raid like this and whistle blowing could become an endangered occupation.