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“Let me put it this
way, that the environment at the moment is getting better for business
and the issues of corruption are being addressed on a daily basis. We
have the EFCC there, we have NDLEA and they are all addressing the
issue. And I believe that there is a clean up exercise going on right
now and it should be given a chance so that we will be able to say in
another 2, 3 years what the position really is.”

Well, it took a
little longer than three years to get to the EFCC’s conviction of Mrs.
Cecilia Ibru former managing director and chief executive officer of
Oceanic Bank for three counts of fraud and money laundering. And though
it was a different clean up exercise than the one she was referring to
in that December 2007 interview on the BBC’s Hardtalk the former
doyenne of the banking industry did get swept up in the famous tsunami
that got its impetus not from the EFCC but from the current governor of
the Central Bank, Lamido Sanusi. He it was who set off the earthquake
when he landed on his new seat last year and the banking shake up that
followed will be forever associated with him Mrs. Ibru is to spend five
months in jail with time taken off for the period already spent in EFCC
custody.

She is to forfeit
assets and cash to the value of N190 billion, an astronomical amount
for most people to fathom. But it does seem from the list of her assets
that the EFCC disclosed that it will be doable. And that, indeed, is
the position.

Cecilia Ibru
handled herself well in that interview fending off the rather goading
questions with calm. She was asked about her bank’s support of public
private partnerships and about where she would draw the line in going
into business with corrupt state governments who channeled revenue into
cars and private planes in a country where 70 percent of the populace
lived inpoverty. “ What you have just described there, of course you
know it is something that we should be ashamed of. It is the structure
that was wrong because if you give money to governors and you don’t ask
for accountability you are asking for trouble. And that is what
happened.”

Ibru explained that
those types of governors had been retired or were on their way out
under the new dispensation of President Yar ‘Adua. “The ones that are
there now they have different approach to how money should be
expended,’’ she said. And continued: “We have the seven point agenda by
our president which everyone is working on and I believe…” Well she
believed that with all arms of government working towards the same goal
it would make for a better Nigeria in years to come.

It is all quite
neat really. Mrs. Ibru saved the country the cost of a long messy
trial, and unexplained disappearances, dropped her initial
protestations against the charges and admitted guilt in a plea bargain
that includes the forfeiture of extensive assets with some miniscule
jail time from a cumulative sentence of 18 months.

Take the case of
Olusoji Abiodun Ilori, 48, who has bagged himself a cumulative sentence
of 120 years for 419 fraud. He is to spend three years in prison. He
was arraigned by the EFCC on a 40-count charge after an arrest at Dugbe
Post Office Ibadan in March 2009 where he was trying to mail more than
200 scam letters containing forged documents.

In sentencing
Ilori, Justice M. Abimbola, according to the statement issued by the
EFCC’s media unit on its website “condemned the attitude of Nigerians
who are desperate to make money at all costs and by any means possible,
thereby bastardising the image of Nigeria. He said the misadventure of
Ilori and other scammers was capable of scaring away foreign investors
and businessmen from the country.”

Well Mr. Ilori will
have to pay his debt to the state in time spent in incarceration since
it seems he was apprehended in midscam so to say. admittedly long after
Mrs. Ibru will have returned home, but the EFCC can pencil him off
their register.

Nigerians though will have to keep a keen count on that long list of
assets from Mrs. Ibru that spans a motley list of capitals Alausa,
Abuja, Dubai and London. Property markets are iffy right across the
globe and the devil knows that keeping track of the paperwork is labour
intensive. So the EFCC’s role is far from over, and while this has been
a successful investigation and something to crow about, 70 percent of
Nigerians must still watch and wait.