The former head of Nigeria’s police force, who quit suddenly amid allegations of corruption in January, has been arrested by the country’s financial crimes watchdog and may appear in court soon, his lawyer and government officials said on Wednesday.
Tafa Balogun was arrested by policemen acting for the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) in the country’s commercial capital Lagos on Tuesday and may be charged in court by Friday, his lawyer Tunji Abayomi, told reporters.
A top official of the EFCC who spoke on condition of anonymity confirmed Balogun’s arrest, but declined to give further details.
A federal high court in Lagos on Tuesday granted a request by the EFCC for 2,7-billion naira (about R125-million) of funds, suspected to have been diverted by Balogun into five different bank accounts, to be frozen.
Balogun suddenly quit as inspector general of police in January at the same time as the EFCC announced that it had traced large sums of illicit money in 12 bank accounts to him. But he was neither arrested nor charged immediately.
Abayomi, his lawyer, has accused the financial crimes watchdog of ”careless, unwarranted and unjustified abuse of authority” in arresting the former police chief.
”The wound of the current harassment of Mr. Tafa Balogun will soon be healed by the proof of his innocence in an impartial court,” he said.
Balogun’s imminent trial appears to form part of President Olusegun Obasanjo’s new push against corruption. This went into full gear with the sacking of Education Minister Fabian Osuji last week over a bribery scandal.
Announcing Osuji’s dismissal in a national broadcast, Obasanjo said Senate President Adolphus Wabara and several legislators had together received a 55 million naira (about R2,56-million) bribe from Osuji to increase his ministry’s budget allocation for 2005.
Wabara has denied the allegations and has shunned calls to quit as leader of the Senate.
Both the Senate and the House of Representatives have condemned Obasanjo’s action and pronouncements on the corruption scandal, accusing him of seeking to ridicule the legislature and waging a selective war on corruption, ignoring allegations against some of his own aides.
A sign of the deepening stand-off between Obasanjo’s administration and the legislature was the failure by Nuhu Ribadu, the head of the EFCC, to honour a summons by the House of Representatives to explain his recent actions.
In a letter stating his inability to appear before the house, Ribadu informed the legislators he would only provide them a report of his investigations through unspecified ”appropriate channels”.
Although the drive to wipe out graft has been a major plank of Obasanjo’s two-term presidency, allegations of government corruption remain rife.
In January 2003, the president fired Labour Minister Hussein Akwanga over allegations that he took bribes from the French company Sagem that enabled it to win a contract to produce new identity cards for Nigeria’s 126-million inhabitants. Akwanga and three other senior politicians charged with him are currently free on bail pending the conclusion of their trial.
The international corruption watchdog Transparency International ranked Nigeria third from bottom, just ahead of Bangladesh and Haiti, in its 2004 corruption perceptions index. — Irin