By Nkechi Eze
The International Criminal Police Organization, INTERPOL, has commended the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, EFCC for its operational effectiveness and collaborative efforts with it in driving activities against national and trans-border financial crimes.
The commission’s spokesperson Dele Oyewale in an official signed statement disclosed that the plaudit was given in Abuja on Wednesday, April 9, 2025 when Interpol top officers, led by Cyril Gout, Executive Director, Police Services, paid a courtesy visit to the EFCC’s Executive Chairman, Ola Olukoyede at the Commission’s corporate headquarters.
Speaking at the occasion, Olaolu Adegbite, Assistant Inspector General of Police, AIG and Head, Interpol National Central Bureau observed that the EFCC, Nigerian Police Force and other law enforcement agencies are partners. “We have been working together, supporting one another and whatever we do at the Nigerian Police Force, specifically from the National Central Bureau, the NCB, we always put EFCC first”, he said.
Adegbite specifically commended the EFCC for its local and global strides, pointing out that “ EFCC is a model for us. The EFCC is an international brand. When you say EFCC, the whole world knows that it projects Nigeria in a very positive way.”
Speaking further, he stated that the EFCC has been pivotal to all the Interpol’s operations. “It is part of Project Agric, Project Water, all our cybercrime projects and Project Serengeti that we just concluded. In all our projects, we always invite EFCC officers and they’ve been doing amazing jobs, working as a collective to make sure that together, we protect our country. The EFCC is one of the first agencies that the NCB linked to the i247 Network. The i247 Network is the global system of communication for Interpol member countries”, he said.
He appreciated Olukoyede for allowing the participation of EFCC representatives at the Interpol’s Silver Working Group. The Silver Notice was created last year specifically to tackle money laundering. He pleaded that the EFCC continues to utilize Interpol’s tools because they are multi-jurisdictional and transnational”
He disclosed that Mr. Gout was in Nigeria for the handover of the West African Police Information System, WAPIS, to West African regional and national authorities . The System is a digitized information-sharing network among law enforcement agencies to break criminal activities among the 16 ECOWAS states. “The WAPIS system is supposed to be domiciled with all our law enforcement agencies where they upload data. Criminal databases are key, especially digitized ones like WAPIS in resolving all forms of crimes,” he said.
He further disclosed that West Africa has the unique challenge of crime dispersal. Criminals migrate across regional borders easily but with WAPIS, crimes such as human trafficking, money laundering, economic crimes, cyber crimes and terrorism can be tackled through robust information amenities among ECOWAS member nations.
Adegbite recalled that the EFCC played a leading role in operationalizing WAPIS right from the onset. “When the WAPIS programme started I think in 2019, the EFCC became the leader of the WAPIS project. It was the agency which provided the largest data upload from Nigeria and it was very reassuring that it did that”.
In his remark, Gout noted that with the handover of WAPIS to Nigerian law enforcement agencies, it has become a national information system.
“It’s a Nigerian Information System to collect and share data that are relevant for the nation’s safety and security. Whatever information that we have, whatever information that we want to cross-check should be contained or shared within this information system. We see the national information system as the only way that we are interconnecting our information sharing and that we are efficient together. So, it is a necessity that we work together,” he said.
Director of Investigation, EFCC, Commander of the EFCC, CE Abdulkarim Chukkol who represented Olukoyede at the occasion, while expressing delight at the visit, noted that the EFCC and INTERPOL have come a long way in synergy and collaboration in multi-dimensional ways that included field operations and human capital development.
According to him, since the EFCC was established in 2003 and started operational activities, the INTERPOL has always been a dependable ally. “We’ve done many things with INTERPOL. We’ve used their tools. It has also enhanced our capacity in many ways. There have been many trainings in which our people benefited. We’ve also done joint operations. I’m also one of the people that have participated in many of those operations both home and abroad. I would say that the EFCC has actually contributed largely in terms of discovering crime trends, in terms of data, in terms of the analyses that are done. It has also helped in formulating some strategies when it comes to crime prevention, when it comes to how to attack some of these crimes that we are seeing”, he said.
Speaking further, Chukkol noted that the scaling up of EFCC activities in the past one year and the globalization of crime trends have made data exchange among law enforcement agencies more compelling. “You may have noticed that the EFCC has heightened its operations in the past one year or so. In one operation alone, it arrested more than 700 people, including 194 foreign nationals and with the globalization of crime and terrorism today and people moving from one country to another, our work is going to be hindered one way or the other without data exchange. Movement in the ECOWAS sub region is very easy and without visas. So, data sharing is something that will assist us in our work. The frightening part of it today is that we have seen people coming from other countries, not within the West African region and participating in some of these frauds. The WAPIS, we believe, is going to do quite a lot for us. We’re going to benefit from it,” the statement concluded
