In a stinging rebuke that is still reverberating through Nigeria’s political and
legal establishment this morning, a Federal High Court has discharged and acquitted
former Head of the Civil Service of the Federation, Winifred Oyo-Ita, of a ₦570 million
money-laundering case the EFCC has spent six years trying to prosecute.
Justice James Omotosho, sitting in Abuja, upheld no-case submissions filed by Oyo-Ita
and eight co-defendants on all 18 counts. In a judgment whose key passages have
been ricocheting across Nigerian newspapers and Twitter since the early hours of
Wednesday, the judge declared that the case presented by the Economic and Financial
Crimes Commission “was built on the quicksand of speculations, suspicions and shoddy
investigation,” and that “the case presented by the prosecution has no weight
whatsoever.”
The decision marks one of the most damning courtroom defeats for the EFCC in recent
memory — and it has reopened a long-running argument in Nigeria about whether the
country’s flagship anti-corruption agency is fit for purpose.
Oyo-Ita was arraigned in March 2020 over allegations involving duty tour allowances,
estacodes and contract kickbacks said to total around ₦570 million. She had served as
Head of the Civil Service under the Buhari administration before being suspended in 2019.
The EFCC alleged that she received proceeds of crime and laundered them
through companies linked to her associates.
But after sifting through six years of testimony, Justice Omotosho said the prosecution
had failed at the most basic level. The court found that the EFCC did not establish the
predicate offence required to prove money laundering, did not show the funds in
question were proceeds of unlawful activity, and could not establish that Oyo-Ita owned
or directed the companies allegedly used to receive the money. The agency’s own seventh and eighth prosecution witnesses admitted under cross-examination that she
was neither a shareholder nor a director of those firms.
The judge also threw out confessional statements that the EFCC had relied on, ruling
that they were not obtained in line with the Administration of Criminal Justice Act
because the agency had failed to produce the legally required video recordings of the
statement-taking sessions. That single procedural failure — a recording that was never
made — collapsed a significant portion of the prosecution’s evidence.
For Oyo-Ita, the verdict closes a personal ordeal that began nearly seven years ago and
saw her stripped of her position, her reputation, and her freedom of movement. Her codefendants, who included junior officials and businesspeople linked to the firms named
in the indictment, were also discharged.
For the EFCC, the political damage may take longer to repair. Critics have seized on the
judgment as confirmation of a pattern that anti-corruption advocates have long flagged:
high-profile arraignments timed to generate headlines, followed by years of weak
courtroom performance and quiet acquittals. “Headlines, then humiliation,” one Lagos
lawyer wrote on X overnight, sharing a screenshot of the judge’s “quicksand” line.
The agency itself has not yet issued a substantive response beyond confirming that it
will study the judgment. Senior officials are reportedly weighing an appeal, but legal
analysts note that the failures identified by the court — missing predicate offence,
unrecorded confessions, witnesses who undermined their own case — are evidentiary,
not procedural, and will be very difficult to fix on appeal.
Politically, the timing could not be more awkward. The Tinubu administration has spent
the past year branding itself as serious about institutional reform, and the Minister of
Interior was just named Vanguard’s Personality of the Year for “decisive reform and
institutional strengthening.” A judgment that publicly accuses one of the federal
government’s flagship agencies of “shoddy investigation” cuts directly across that
narrative.
For ordinary Nigerians watching the headlines this morning, the takeaway is simpler and
sharper. After six years of trial, ten kobo of the alleged ₦570 million has not been
recovered, no one has been convicted, and the country’s top anti-graft body has been
told by a federal judge that its case was, in essence, built on sand.
