By Dr. Wahab Shittu
In July 2020, I watched the machinery of the Nigerian state turn upon its own chief corruption hunter. Ibrahim Magu, then acting Chairman of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, was picked up, detained and suspended from office, and made to answer before a presidential investigation panel chaired by Justice Ayo Salami, a retired President of the Court of Appeal.
I know the events of those weeks more intimately than most, because I was his counsel. This week, six years on almost to the day, the Federal High Court in Abuja ordered the final forfeiture of forty-eight properties linked to Mr. Abubakar Malami, SAN, the former Attorney-General of the Federation and Minister of Justice, upon whose memorandum to the President the case against Magu had been built.
The two events, read together, tell a story larger than either man, and it is that story, of process, of proof and of the long memory of the law, that this piece sets out to tell.
The travail of Ibrahim Magu
The case against Magu arrived not by charge and arraignment but by memorandum: a catalogue of allegations from the office of the Attorney-General, ranging from insubordination to discrepancies in the accounting for recovered assets, which persuaded the President to convene the Salami panel.
What followed was an ordeal by process of an unusual kind. The nation’s foremost anti-corruption officer was arrested without warrant, detained for days without charge, suspended from office while the inquiry into him had barely opened, and tried, in substance if not in form, before a panel sitting behind the walls of the Presidential Villa, beyond the ordinary guarantees of the open courtroom.
As his counsel, I insisted then, publicly and before the panel, on the elementary things: that an accuser must prove, that a man must know and confront the case against him, that suspension is not conviction, and that an inquiry which will not publish its findings has punished a man’s name without judging his cause.
The sequel vindicated the insistence. The panel’s report,submitted in November 2020, was never officially published; no White Paper ever issued; and, most eloquently of all, no charge was ever preferred against Ibrahim Magu in any court, then or since.
He denied every allegation, returned to the Nigeria Police Force, was promoted to the rank of Assistant Inspector-General by the Police Service Commission in May 2022, and retired with that rank and his pension. I make no triumphal point.
I record, rather, the melancholy one: an accusation of that magnitude, pressed with the full weight of the state and then simply abandoned, adjudicated by nobody, leaves everyone worse off, the accused, whose vindication is incomplete because it was never formally pronounced; the accusers, whose motives are forever open to question; and the public, which was promised accountability and given only spectacle.
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Accountability by ambush is not accountability at all. It is the personalisation of institutions, and institutions personalised in one season will be turned, in the next, upon the very hands that personalised them.
The forfeiture of the Malami properties
Which brings us to this week’s ruling. In January of this year, on the application of the EFCC, Justice Emeka Nwite of the Federal High Court ordered the interim forfeiture of fifty-seven properties, hotels, residential buildings, schools, lands and a printing press across Kebbi, Kano and the Federal Capital Territory, said by the Commission to be worth some two hundred and thirteen billion naira and linked to the former Attorney-General and two of his sons.
The interim order did what interim forfeiture orders do: it preserved the assets and called upon all who claimed them to come and show cause why they should not be finally forfeited. On Wednesday, Justice Joyce Abdulmalik delivered the final ruling.
Forty-eight of the properties were finally forfeited to the Federal Government, the court holding that the Commission had established a reasonable suspicion that they were proceeds of unlawful activity and that the respondents had failed to demonstrate the lawful origin of the funds with which they were acquired.
Nine properties, in Kebbi and Kaduna, were released, the court finding the Commission’s proof wanting in respect of them. Separately, and importantly separately, Mr. Malami, his son and his wife face a sixteen-count money laundering charge involving some 8.7 billion naira, which remains to be tried.
It is important that the public understand precisely what happened in that courtroom, because forfeiture of this kind is widely misunderstood. This was a non-conviction-based forfeiture: a civil proceeding directed at the property itself, not at the person, asking not ‘is this man guilty of a crime’ but, in the trial judge’s own framing, how legitimate are the funds with which these assets were acquired.
The architecture is familiar to every practitioner in this field. The Commission places before the court material grounding a reasonable suspicion that assets are the proceeds of unlawful activity; the court orders interim forfeiture and public notice; and the evidential burden then shifts to those who claim the assets to explain, with documents and credible testimony, the lawful income from which such wealth could have come.
Where the explanation is furnished, the property is released, as nine of these properties were. Where it is not, the inference the law permits is drawn. Readers of my work will recognise in this the very question to which I have devoted a three-volume study: the problem of unexplained wealth, of assets grossly disproportionate to every known lawful income of their holder, and of a legal order that has decided, correctly in my view, that such wealth may be called upon to explain itself.
Two cautions follow, and I state them with emphasis. First, the forfeiture is not a conviction. Mr. Malami has been convicted of nothing; the criminal charge against him and his family remains to be tried, and he enjoys there, in full measure, the presumption of innocence that the Constitution extends to every accused person, together with the right to appeal the forfeiture itself.
He has contested the proceedings vigorously, accusing the Commission of inflating the value of the assets, and it is his right to press every such point through every lawful avenue. Secondly, the release of the nine properties deserves as much attention as the forfeiture of the forty-eight, for it demonstrates that the court sat as a court and not as a rubber stamp: the Commission was put to proof, and where its proof failed, it lost. Both halves of the ruling, the forfeiture and the release, are the system working.
The wheel, and what it teaches
I am conscious of the irony, and I decline to gloat over it. The official who once catalogued, in a memorandum to the President, the alleged failures of the EFCC in the management of recovered assets, now watches the asset-recovery machinery of that same Commission applied to property associated with him.
The prosecutor of one season has become the respondent of another, just as the EFCC chairman who succeeded Magu was himself, in his turn, suspended and detained. There is a lesson in this procession, and it is not the cheap one.
It is that in a Republic governed by law, the machinery of accountability outlives every minister who operates it, and must; that those who wield extraordinary powers should wield them with the humility of men who may one day stand at the receiving end; and that the only lasting protection any public officer has is not office, or connection, but the integrity of the process itself, kept scrupulously fair for everyone, because everyone may need it.
The contrast in process between 2020 and 2026 is itself instructive. Magu’s reckoning was conducted by an ad hoc panel, in camera, upon a report never published, and it ended in silence. The Malami forfeiture has been conducted in open court, upon motions argued and ruled upon, by judges whose reasons are on the record and whose orders are appealable.
Whatever one’s view of either man, the second process is the constitutional one, and the difference between them is the difference this column has spent years urging: accountability through institutions, in public, on evidence, with rights of defence and appeal, rather than accountability by presidential panel, press leak and abandonment.
The 2022 reform that placed the recovery and management of criminal assets on a statutory footing, with the Proceeds of Crime (Recovery and Management) Act, was Parliament’s answer to the very controversies over recovered assets on which the Magu affair was built; the courts’ growing mastery of the non-conviction-based forfeiture jurisdiction is the judiciary’s contribution; and what remains is the discipline to apply these instruments evenly, to allies and adversaries of every government alike, for an anti-corruption law that bends with the political wind is not law but weather.
Let me end where a lawyer should, with the files. Six years ago I argued that my client was entitled to due process, to confrontation, to proof, and to a published outcome, and I hold today, with perfect consistency, that Mr. Malami is entitled to exactly the same: a fair trial of the charges, a fair hearing of any appeal, and judgment on evidence rather than on irony.
The law’s promise is not that the mighty will fall; it is that everyone, mighty and small, accuser and accused, will be judged by the same rules, in the open, on proof. That promise failed Ibrahim Magu in 2020 in the manner of his treatment, whatever the merits; it is being kept, so far, in the Federal High Court in 2026.
The wheel of accountability turns slowly in Nigeria, but this week it turned in public, on evidence, with reasons. That is progress, and those of us who keep the ledgers of the rule of law should say so, record it accurately, and insist that it keep turning, no matter whose gate it stops before next.
*Shittu, is a Senior Advocate of Nigeria.
