When Anti-Corruption Agencies Answer to the Executive: Nigeria, India, and the Independence Problem

What would genuine institutional independence look like in Indian & Nigerian contexts? The minimum conditions are not complicated.

In November 2024, the Supreme Court of Nigeria dismissed a suit brought by 16 State governors seeking to dissolve the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) on constitutional grounds.¹ The governors argued, among other things, that the National Assembly lacked the authority under Section 12, Nigerian Constitution to enact the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (Establishment) Act, 2004 (EFCC Establishment Act) without the requisite concurrence of State houses of assembly. The court was not persuaded. But the suit, whatever its legal weaknesses, exposed something that its dismissal did not resolve: The EFCC is an agency whose operational independence rests almost entirely on the disposition of whoever appointed its chairman.

Indian lawyers will recognise the structure. The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) has spent decades litigating a comparable problem. The Supreme Court of India called it a “caged parrot” in Vineet Narain v. Union of India², a description that has aged poorly only in the sense that the cage has been periodically redesigned without being removed. The CBI Director’s appointment, removal, and tenure have been the subject of statutory amendments, contempt proceedings, and political controversy across multiple governments.³ The Prevention of Corruption Act, 1988 has been amended.⁴ The Lokpal has been constituted.⁵ The independence problem has not been solved.

In Nigeria, the EFCC Chairman is appointed by the President on the recommendation of the Council of State, with no legislative confirmation process that creates genuine independence.⁶ There is no fixed, non-renewable tenure insulated from executive pressure. The practical consequence is documented: civil society organisations, Nigerian Bar Association branches, and legal commentators have noted across three successive administrations that the agency’s prosecution decisions correlate with the political relationships of the accused rather than the strength of the available evidence.⁷ The same pattern — charge when useful, adjourn when not — is what the 16 governors were, in effect, trying to institutionalise as constitutional principle when they filed their 2024 suit.

The Indian experience offers both a warning and a partial model. The Delhi Special Police Establishment Act, 1946, as amended by the Central Vigilance Commission Act, 2003, introduced a fixed two-year tenure for the CBI Director and made removal subject to a committee recommendation.⁸ The Lokpal and Lokayuktas Act, 2013 went further, creating a multi-member oversight body with statutory independence.⁹ Neither reform eliminated political interference entirely. The removal of CBI Director Alok Verma in January 2019, less than 24 hours after the Supreme Court restored him to office,¹⁰ demonstrated that statutory protections are only as strong as the political willingness to observe them. But the Indian reforms did create a public record and a legal basis for challenge that Nigeria’s current framework does not provide.

The Proceeds of Crime (Recovery and Management) Act, 2022 is Nigeria’s most recent structural reform. It created a framework for non-conviction-based forfeiture that is, in principle, less dependent on prosecutorial follow-through than the previous conviction-based recovery model.¹¹ The parallel in Indian law is the Prevention of Money-Laundering Act, 2002, as amended in 2019, which similarly expanded attachment and forfeiture powers.¹² Both frameworks have been criticised for concentrating enforcement discretion without correspondingly strengthening oversight. India’s Supreme Court, in Vijay Madanlal Choudhary v. Union of India¹³, upheld the PMLA‘s broad enforcement architecture against constitutional challenge, a decision that remains contested by civil liberties practitioners precisely because it validated discretion without mandating accountability.

Nigeria’s transparency international ranking fell two positions in the 2025 Corruption Perceptions Index despite the EFCC’s record 4111 convictions in 2024. India ranked 96th on the same index, broadly unchanged from the prior year, despite the CBI, Enforcement Directorate (ED), and Lokpal all operating simultaneously.¹⁴ Enforcement activity and perceived accountability are not the same thing, and the consumer price index (CPI) is measuring the latter.

What would genuine institutional independence look like in both contexts? The minimum conditions are not complicated. Appointment processes for anti-corruption agency heads should require multi-institutional concurrence — executive nomination plus legislative confirmation with an adversarial hearing — rather than executive appointment with nominal oversight. Tenure should be fixed, non-renewable, and protected against removal except through a process that itself involves judicial review. Charging decisions in cases involving politically exposed persons should be subject to an independent audit, with published declination reports that allow civil society to scrutinise what the agency decided not to prosecute. These reforms would not eliminate political pressure. They would make it visible and legally contestable.

The Indian Lokpal, for all its slow operationalisation, at least establishes the principle that no single institutional actor should control both the initiation and the conclusion of senior-level corruption investigations. Nigeria has not yet accepted that principle in its statutory architecture. The EFCC’s enabling Act vests the full investigative, prosecutorial, and asset recovery chain in a single agency whose leadership is executive-appointed and executive-removable.¹⁵ The 16 governors who challenged that arrangement in court were doing so in bad faith. But the structural critique buried inside their political challenge was not entirely wrong.