Chairman of the Code of Conduct Bureau (CCB), Prof Muhammed Isah, has stressed the need to have a special court that will be restricted to adjudicating corruption cases and fast track the process instead of having corruption cases cued in the conventional court.
Isah made this demand during the public presentation of the 2021 Chartered Institute of Forensics and Certified Fraud Examiners of Nigeria (CIFCFEN) country report at the EFCC Academy over the weekend in Abuja.
He said, “You find out that if we have that special court only corruption cases will go to that court and at the end of the day the power is also restricted to only adjudicating corruption cases which will go a long way to address the issue of having corruption cases cued in our conventional court.
“We still have a number of issues relating to fundamental rights of accused person and anything that has to do with fundamental rights must have a fair hearing. We have to look at our laws like presumption of innocence and impunity of public office holders.”
Earlier in his opening remarks, the president and chairman, governing council, of CIFCFEN, Dr Iliyasu Gashinbaki, noted that the institute is the only non-state actor that has taken and reviewed the anti-corruption status.
According to him, what is even more profound is that this is their first country report which focuses on national interest.
Gashinbaki said, “We are going to still continue with the process of collecting data with the view of making the report to be more robust on a continuous basis, but more importantly the second strategy is being developed. So, we intend to mainstream the highlighted challenges of this report co-opt our key recommendations into the second strategy.”
In her remarks, the anti-corruption project coordinator, United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), Isatou Batonon, stated that a lot of stakeholders are involved, anti-corruption agencies and civil society organisations have a clear sense of what needs to be done to put words into action for the next phrase.
She disclosed that UNODC had been supporting Nigerian government and citizens in line with United Nations convention against corruption and we supported national corruption survey together with National Bureau of Statistics.
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