Acting Chairman of Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC), Mr. Ibrahim Magu, has described the term “media trial” as only a gimmick by corrupt individuals to cover up the truth.
Magu, who stated this at the launch of ‘Corruption Busters 2017’ at the EFCC Lagos office, noted that there was no one strategy to fighting corruption, explaining that all strategies could be thrown at the corrupt individuals to recover looted money from them.
Pleading with Nigerians to stop celebrating corruption as it would go a long way to hamper the fight against corruption, Magu said, “There is nothing like media trial. The term is a gimmick by corrupt people to hide the truth. If you are a thief, you should be exposed. If you have looted the public fund, we will expose you; there is nothing wrong in that.
The people should know that you have stolen their money. Our own is to carry out thorough investigation, provide sufficient evidence and leave it with the court. The corrupt are not saying that they have not stolen because we have sufficient evidence. They should tell Nigerians that they have not stolen rather than use ‘media trial’ to confuse people,” EFCC boss observed.
According to him, “There is no one strategy in fighting corruption. Whatever weapon you have should be thrown at corrupt personalities to chase them out and expose them to let them return our common wealth back to the treasury to be judiciously utilized for the good of the people. So just use your strategic thinking and apply whatever strategy available to you to defeat the circumstances, but the fight must go on.”
He reasoned that “Corruption is something that we cannot fight alone and one of the most effective strategies is to mobilize everybody into the fight in every facet or strata of life. The more we are involved in the fight against corruption, the better for us all because we need to educate people and bring them into the fight. If we can sustain this fight and put heads together with determination and sustain the tempo at which we are moving for the next one year, there will be a huge change” he said.
“Already there is change of attitude coming into the fight. So everybody need to be genuinely involved because this is not personal but is about this country and the future of our children, youths. We need to protect the present but we must also ensure better life for the next generation. Some of us had better life since most of our schoolings were on scholarships,” Magu said.
