The Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) has a very straightforward job — catch and prosecute people that commit economic and financial crimes. It’s in the name. Sometimes, EFCC agents do succeed in doing their job of arresting real criminals.
Other times? They break into hotels and harass innocent people or threaten non-suspects for not doing their jobs for them.
But the EFCC cannot do its job alone. It’s kind of hard to be everywhere at once to stamp out corruption in a country of over 200 million people. So the Buhari administration launched the whistleblowing programme in 2016.
The Holy Book says, “Love your neighbour as yourself,” but the Nigerian government says, “Snitch on your neighbour and we’ll give you a cut.”
The whistleblowing policy encourages Nigerians to provide information to the government whenever they notice a violation of financial regulations. These violations include mismanagement of public funds and assets, bribery, fraud and theft.
Whistleblowers are encouraged to report as much as they know to help authorities investigate and build cases against suspects. To sweeten the deal, a whistleblower is entitled to between 2.5% and 5% of the amount recovered from the person they snitch on. This means a whistleblower that provides significant information that leads to the recovery of, say, 100 million can potentially walk away with a 5 million reward.
The whole point of the whistleblower programme is to expose...
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