I receive death threats, corruption is Fighting Back — EFCC boss

Abdulrasheed Bawa, the Chairman of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC), has claimed that he frequently receives death threats.

Speaking during an interview on Channels TV’s Sunrise Daily on Tuesday, Bawa said this when asked about President Muhammadu Buhari’s frequent assertion that “corruption is fighting back,”. The EFCC boss stated that he received a threat call last week when he was in New York, USA.

“Last week I was in New York when a senior citizen received a phone call from somebody that is not even under investigation.

“The young man said ‘I am going to kill him (Bawa), I am going to kill him’.

“I get death threats. So it is real. Corruption can fight back,” he said.

He noted there were many loopholes in the civil service, particularly in contract processing, citing “emergency contracts” as an example.

Bawa said: “A particular agency is notorious for that. They have turned all their contracts to emergency contracts.”

However, he said, EFCC has strategies in place to check corruptions, one of which is “corruption risk assessments of MDAs”.

“I have written to the Minister and would soon commence the process of corruption risk assessments of all the parastatals and agencies under the Ministry of Petroleum Resources to look at their vulnerability to fraud and advise them accordingly, he said

When asked if the scale of the country’s corruption overwhelms him, Bawa, the EFCC boss, replied, “Yes and no.”