By Rekpene Bassey
In May 2016, Britain’s then Prime Minister, David Cameron, was caught on camera describing Nigeria and Afghanistan as “fantastically corrupt countries.”
The remark angered Nigerians, but Muhammadu Buhari’s response was more consequential: rather than demand an apology, he demanded the return of Nigeria’s stolen assets hidden abroad. A decade later, the more important question is no longer whether Nigeria is corrupt, but whether the country is becoming less corrupt.
The latest figures from the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) suggest remarkable progress. Under Chairman Ola Olukoyede, the Commission says it has recovered approximately ₦1.23 trillion in 34 months, secured 10,872 convictions and taken 14,476 investigated petitions to court.
These achievements deserve recognition. They demonstrate that Nigeria can build substantial institutional capacity to investigate economic crime, prosecute offenders and recover stolen wealth.
But these figures require a broader interpretation. An anti-corruption agency can become better at catching corruption without the country becoming better at preventing it.
More convictions may reflect stronger enforcement, but they may also indicate that corruption continues to generate a large pipeline of cases. The real test of success is therefore not simply how much corruption is uncovered after the damage is done, but whether the systems that enable it are becoming harder to exploit.
That is the next challenge for Nigeria. Enforcement must remain strong, but it cannot by itself produce institutional integrity. A durable response requires closing loopholes, increasing transparency, strengthening controls and making illicit enrichment increasingly difficult to conceal or enjoy.
The EFCC’s record is nevertheless significant. In 2024 alone, the Commission reported 4,111 convictions and recoveries exceeding ₦365 billion. Such figures demonstrate that Nigerian institutions can acquire serious investigative and prosecutorial capacity. But statistics are not self-interpreting. Rising convictions can reflect better policing, an expanding criminal market, or both.
This ambiguity becomes more striking when enforcement statistics are placed beside Nigeria’s broader corruption indicators. The country’s 2025 Corruption Perceptions Index score remained at 26 out of 100, ranking Nigeria 142nd out of 182 countries.
Perception indices are not perfect measurements, but they provide an important external signal: stronger enforcement has yet to produce a comparable transformation in the wider integrity environment.
This should not be interpreted as an indictment of the EFCC. No anti-corruption agency can prosecute a country into integrity. Police forces cannot police morality into existence, courts cannot manufacture civic virtue through sentencing, and prosecutors cannot permanently compensate for defective procurement systems, political patronage and weak institutional controls. Law enforcement is indispensable, but it is ultimately one component of a much larger governance architecture.
The architecture of corruption itself has also changed. Yesterday’s corrupt transaction was often visible: an envelope under a table, an inflated contract, a forged cheque, an abandoned project or cash collected at a checkpoint.
Today, criminal networks operate through smartphones, compromised identities, shell companies, cryptocurrency wallets, fintech platforms, business-email compromise and offshore structures. Money can cross jurisdictions before conventional investigators have even identified the crime.
Fraud-related losses of more than ₦17.5 billion reported in 2023 illustrate this expanding digital dimension. Identity theft, phishing, SIM-swap schemes, investment fraud and business-email compromise are not simply new versions of old crimes; they represent a financial environment in which criminals can operate remotely, anonymously and across borders.
The modern fraudster may never meet the victim, enter a government office or physically touch the stolen money. A laptop, mobile telephone, social-engineering skills and access to sophisticated financial channels may be sufficient. Nigeria’s response must therefore incorporate financial intelligence, cyber-investigation, data analytics and anticipatory regulation alongside conventional policing.
The decisive advantage will belong to institutions capable of recognising suspicious patterns across millions of transactions rather than waiting for losses to become obvious. Nigeria cannot afford to acquire technological sophistication only after criminals have demonstrated what technological sophistication looks like.
But corruption is not sustained by technology alone. It also thrives in environments where legitimate opportunity appears scarce while spectacular and unexplained wealth is publicly celebrated. Young Nigerians see individuals with no visible record of productive enterprise suddenly acquire enormous fortunes. They see politically connected figures survive allegations that would destroy careers elsewhere. They see conspicuous consumption rewarded more visibly than honest enterprise.
Under such conditions, the moral question can shift from “How was this wealth created?” to “How can I obtain mine?” Poverty and unemployment matter, but the greater danger is the normalisation of illicit enrichment. When society admires the mansion without questioning its source, corruption acquires social legitimacy before it encounters legal punishment.
Political impunity deepens the problem. Nothing damages the credibility of an anti-corruption campaign faster than the perception that accountability depends on political affiliation, influence or proximity to power. If citizens believe the law is severe toward the weak but negotiable for the powerful, corruption becomes a calculation of risk rather than a breach of public trust.
This is why certainty matters. Punishment need not simply be severe; it must be lawful, timely, predictable and politically neutral. The potential offender should have good reason to believe that status or connections will not provide protection.
Public procurement is one of the most important places to apply this principle. Corruption often begins before money changes hands; when tender specifications are designed around a preferred bidder, companies conceal common ownership, contracts are overpriced or political intermediaries determine winners before formal procedures begin. By the time investigators trace the money, the state may already have lost the first battle.
Government transactions should therefore leave searchable digital footprints. Procurement databases should connect with company-registration records, tax information, beneficial-ownership registers, asset declarations and financial intelligence. Data systems can flag abnormal pricing, collusive bidding and suspicious relationships before payments are made. The question should not only be who stole public money, but why the system allowed the transaction to proceed.
This requires institutional interoperability. The EFCC, Independent Corrupt Practices and Other Related Offences Commission, Nigerian Financial Intelligence Unit, Central Bank of Nigeria, Nigeria Inter-Bank Settlement System, Police, Customs, tax authorities, Corporate Affairs Commission and relevant intelligence institutions cannot effectively confront networked financial crime as isolated bureaucratic islands.
Financial crime is networked; the institutions confronting it must therefore be capable of sharing intelligence and acting on it collectively.
Their roles should remain complementary rather than competitive. Financial intelligence institutions should identify patterns; investigative agencies should pursue cases; regulators should strengthen controls within banks, fintechs and payment systems; procurement authorities should identify irregularities before contracts are awarded; and tax authorities should interrogate suspicious wealth.
The objective is not one omnipotent agency, but a system in which responsibility is distributed, and weaknesses are harder to exploit.
Yet institutions and technology will still fail if Nigeria neglects the human dimension. Aristotle understood that character is cultivated through habit. A society cannot spend eighteen years teaching young people, implicitly or explicitly, that wealth is the strongest evidence of success and then expect law enforcement to reverse those lessons in adulthood.
Ethical formation must therefore become part of education, encompassing civic responsibility, financial ethics, conflicts of interest, digital citizenship and respect for public property.
The deeper struggle is therefore over what Nigeria chooses to reward. If influence, unexplained wealth and conspicuous consumption command greater admiration than enterprise, competence and integrity, corruption will continue to possess a powerful social constituency.
The country must change the incentives surrounding public office and private wealth so that honesty is not treated as naïveté and illicit enrichment is not mistaken for achievement.
What would victory look like? Not a country permanently celebrating rising conviction figures. It would be a Nigeria where contracts are harder to manipulate, suspicious wealth attracts scrutiny, financial crimes are detected earlier, prosecutions are less political and illicit assets are increasingly difficult to conceal. The most meaningful anti-corruption statistics would eventually be the numbers that fall.
There remains, finally, Juvenal’s ancient question: Who guards the guardians? An anti-corruption system worthy of public confidence must scrutinise itself. Who audits recovered assets? Who monitors investigators and politically sensitive settlements? Who ensures seized property does not disappear into another circle of opacity? Institutions demanding transparency from others cannot exempt themselves. Accountability without self-accountability eventually becomes another form of power.
Nigeria’s strongest response to David Cameron should therefore not be another diplomatic protest or patriotic rebuttal. It should be evidence: declining fraud losses, fewer manipulated contracts, transparent beneficial ownership, public officials unable to convert office into unexplained fortunes, and stolen assets becoming harder to conceal. The most convincing answer to the insults of 2016 would be a Nigeria in which innovation, enterprise and skill offer a more credible path to prosperity than fraud, patronage or political connection.
The EFCC’s ₦1.23 trillion in recoveries and 10,872 convictions deserve recognition because they demonstrate that Nigerian institutions can pursue offenders and recover public wealth at scale. But these achievements should be regarded as a foundation, not a finish line. Nigeria’s next anti-corruption frontier is to build institutions and incentives that make corruption progressively harder to commit, detect sooner when it occurs and less rewarding when attempted.
The country must proceed, in a useful adaptation of an old maxim, non ad damnandos, sed ad praecavendum – not merely to punish, but to prevent. Only then will Nigeria possess its most persuasive response to the insults of the past: not indignation, but transformation.
*Rekpene Bassey is the President of the African Council on Narcotics and a Security Specialist
