Civil rights advocacy group, Human Rights Writers Association of Nigeria, HURIWA on Wednesday, urged security agencies to provide adequate cover for the Chairman of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, EFCC Abdulrasheed Bawa, against “any sort of sinister violent plot” by corrupt politicians and businessmen in the country.
National Coordinator of HURIWA, Emmanuel Onwubiko, in a statement titled, ‘Nothing Should Happen To EFCC’s Chairman Bawa: HURIWA Warns’.
NewsSpecng gathered that Bawa, in a television interview on Tuesday, said corruption was fighting back, adding that he had received a number of death threats from high-profile Nigerians.
Reacting in its statement, HURIWA said, “We believe that the appointment of this youngster as the substantive Chairman of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission could be a fresh breath into the increasingly waning and ethically diminished anti-graft crusade of President Muhammadu Buhari’s administration.
“Seeing his refreshing youthfulness and his expressed or vocalised zeal to battle relentlessly the hydra-headed monster of economic crimes especially amongst top-flight government officials, we are hereby expressing our solidarity with the Chairman of EFCC Abdulrasheed Bawa and urging the President and Commander-in-Chief of the Nigerian Armed Forces to extend the best protection available humanly speaking to his trusted appointee who seems to have started well, so his adversaries will not put him in the way of harm or danger.
“If anything happens to him, then it will be well known that forces embedded within the administration are the key suspects given the unprecedented quantum of sophisticated and crude economic crimes and corruption that have eroded the few gains made by the six year old administration of President Muhammadu Buhari. So, it is in the self-enlightened interest of President Muhammadu Buhari that Abdulrasheed Bawa and other officers of the EFCC are protected from any sort of sinister violent plot.”
The President had in February 2021 named 40-year-old Bawa as the new EFCC chairman to replace the embattled ex-acting chairman of the anti-graft commission, Ibrahim Magu.
