Farida Waziri, the chairperson of Nigeria’s Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, will tomorrow, October 23, 2009, make another appearance at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), this time in New York.
A copy of the invitation, which has been obtained by Saharareporters, indicates she will make a presentation on "Addressing Corruption: The Economic and Financial Crimes Commission of Nigeria."
The visit will be coming four days after a similar appearance at the CFR in Washington DC. And as was the case on Monday, she will speak only before an “invitation-only” audience.
In between Mrs. Waziri’s two CFR events, she went to the National Conference of Black Mayors’ (NCBM) meeting in Las Vegas. Obviously not properly debriefed, the NCBM had invited PDP President, Umaru Yar’Adua, a man who only last month chose a Saudi Arabia college opening ceremony to the United Nations General Assembly, to give the keynote address at its convention this week.
The CFR’s hush-hush roundtable discussion is scheduled to take place from 12:00 p.m. to 1:30 p.m. at the CFR New York headquarters at 58 East 68th Street. The CFR hosted an equally secret event in Washington DC on Monday to a select group comprised mostly of Nigerian embassy officials.
Waziri, a source told Saharareporters, might meet with some officials of the Nigerian desk at the US State Department and National Security Agency before departing the US. It is unclear who amongst the officials would be meeting with her; she clearly continues to be shunned by higher foreign officials. But Ambassador Princeton Lyman who packaged her current tour, may have convinced low-level officials and analysts at the department to talk with her. She is being packaged as doing some work to clean up the Nigerian banking sector.
Her New York appearance comes as some EFCC officials are lamenting the mass exodus of competent officials from the agency in response to Waziri’s ineffectiveness on corruption. To stem the exodus, Mrs. Waziri has now introduced an illegal administrative "Staff Bond" aimed at forcing such officials to stay on.
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A copy of the "Staff Bond" obtained from her office requires anyone employed by the EFCC to stay with the agency for three years, or pay to the agency up to one year’s salary. The staff bond designed by Mrs. Waziri is in addition to the so-called “Ten Commandments” to staff she published on the Commission’s website in June 2008. The 10th commandment is loyalty, of which she wrote, “This is 100 percent (100%) absolute commitment and faithfulness to the leadership of the commission.”
Saharareporters was told that the employees began to leave in sizeable numbers after since she turned the EFCC into a corruption-infested nest with sweepers and security men sent out to investigate local government accounts around the country. Our sources said most of the officials simply disappeared after local government chairpersons “settled” them. No report was made available on her investigation and probe of LGAs.
In addition, the Nigerian Senate told our reporters that they cannot locate the EFCC’s annual report that should have been provided to it as required by the law setting up the commission. It is the second year in a row that the report was not submitted by the Waziri-led EFCC.
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