By Chidi Anselm Odinkalu

Around 6 February 2005, John Githongo, Permanent Secretary in Kenya’s Presidency responsible for Governance and Ethics, resigned after only two years in the role. As Michaela Wrong narrates in her vicarious memoir of Githongo’s tenure, his resignation letter was transmitted from an anonymous grocer’s shop in London at the beginning of what turned out to be a three-year-long exile. He had fled the job “fearing he could be murdered.”

When he took up the position in 2003, Githongo had arrived with energy and ideas from a senior role in global corruption watch-dog, Transparency International. Corruption, he told Ms. Wrong, “could only be fought from the top.” The main lesson from his two years on the job, instead, appeared to be that fighting corruption was also most usually frustrated from the top.

Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, who had her own run-ins with trying to keep the country on the tarmac as Finance Minister, titled her memoirs on public finance reforms: Fighting Corruption is Dangerous. The New York Times described Githongo’s experience as “a cautionary tale about the dangers of challenging a thoroughly corrupted system.” Such tales have become the staple of a succession of bedraggled tenures of chief executives of Nigeria’s leading anti-corruption institution, the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, EFCC.

By some coincidence, the EFCC’s first Chairman, Nuhu Ribadu, took his job in the same year that President Mwai Kibaki appointed John Githongo to his position as the presumptive Czar of anti-corruption in the country. The year after his appointment, Ribadu reached an agreement with the Nigeria Police College, Ikeja, to train cadets for the EFCC. Among the graduates from the Course 1 Cadet cohort in 2004 was one Abdulrasheed Bawa.

The brief of the EFCC, meanwhile, ran up against constitutional design and cynical politics. Although the Commission is empowered primarily to ensure accountability through criminal prosecutions, ultimate control of that function under Nigeria’s constitution lies not with the Chairman of the EFCC but with the Attorney-General of the Federation and Minister of Justice, who sits in Cabinet, where the EFCC Chair does not. What the president gives to the EFCC Chair, he can take away by sleight of hand, a nod, or a wink in the direction of his Attorney-General.