By Nkechi Eze
In a bid to enhance the collaboration and coordination in the fight against corruption and financial crimes, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) is looking to strengthen its partnership with the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) in Nigeria.
To achieve this, UNODC Country Representative, Cheikh Ousmane Toure, led a delegation to the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) headquarters in Abuja on Thursday, January 23, 2025. The visit was a courtesy call on the EFCC’s Executive Chairman, Mr. Ola Olukoyede.
A statement made available to newsmen by the commission’s spokesman states that; Toure, who said that he was eager for knowledge sharing among West African States explained that “this is the only way we can bring a little bit of more safety and security to our children. The menaces are many and complex and today we have AI. Imagine AI in the hand of a cybercrime criminal doing movements on bitcoins? What will be our line of defence in investigating such cases? It will be more complex than those cases that you cracked in the past. It will require new sets of legal understanding to criminalize those cases.
Additionally, Toure stated that “the second element is on international cooperation with countries where there is a lot of investment from Nigerians and where you have difficulties to seize some of the ill-gotten assets. I don’t want my tenure to be some sort of UN framework tenure. No. I am a technician. I’m the child of West Africa. I want an effective partnership. So, basically what I am here to engage on is that if we work with you, I want that to be a partnership. There is a lot of expertise in Nigeria. Those expertise can help us achieve our goals. So it is only fair to go for strategic partnership.”
Olukoyede in his response, emphasized that achieving the outlined goals relies on the collaborative efforts of the UNODC and the EFCC, with a focus on fortifying their existing partnership.
“All that you have said boils down to the need for us to strengthen our relationship and to work together. As a matter of fact, we have a very good working relationship as a country and also as a Commission with UNODC. We have had decades of relationship with UNODC and it has been of mutual benefit and interest. Most of the things in our mandate have almost become global in nature. We are looking at money laundering, financing of terrorism, proliferation of small arms and all of that. There is a very strong relationship between our mandate and yours. Where you see some of these crimes happening, there is an element of money laundering and in all financial crimes generally”, he said.
The EFCC’s boss further stressed that, “we need to establish a very strong collaboration with other law enforcement, security agencies and also our partners on the international scene. We will continue to build on the existing relationship. There is a need for us to collaborate more particularly on the relationship that we have with the United Nations in the area of asset recovery. We also want to pledge our support for your tenure. All the areas where you need to get our cooperation and our synergy, we are going to make them available to you.”
