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In July 2020, I watched the Nigerian state machinery turn against its own chief corruption hunter. Ibrahim Magu, then acting chairman of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, was arrested, detained and suspended from office and forced to answer before a presidential investigative commission chaired by Justice Ayo Salami, retired president of the Court of Appeal.
I know the events of those weeks more intimately than most, because I was his lawyer.
This week, almost six years later, the Federal High Court in Abuja ordered the final forfeiture of forty-eight properties linked to Mr Abubakar Malami, SAN, former Attorney General of the Federation and Minister of Justice, on whose memorandum to the President the case against Magu was built.
The two events, read together, tell a larger story of both men, and it is that story, of trial, of evidence and of the law’s long memory, that this piece sets out to tell.
The travails of Ibrahim Magu.
The case against Magu came not with indictment and subpoena but with a memorandum: a list of allegations from the attorney general’s office, ranging from insubordination to discrepancies in the accounting of recovered assets, which convinced the president to convene the Salami panel.
What followed was a trial through a process of an unusual kind.
The nation’s top anti-corruption official was arrested without a warrant, detained for days without charge, suspended from office while the investigation into him was just opened, and tried, in substance if not in form, before a panel sitting behind the walls of the Presidential Villa, beyond the normal safeguards of the open courtroom.
As his lawyer, I insisted then, publicly and before the commission, on the elementary things: that an accuser must prove, that a man must know and address the case against him, that suspension is not a conviction, and that an inquiry which will not publish its findings has punished a man’s name without judging the cause.
The sequel confirmed the insistence.
The panel’s report, presented in November 2020, was never officially published; no White Paper has ever been published; and, most telling of all, no charges were ever brought against Ibrahim Magu in any court, either then or since.
He denied all wrongdoing, returned to the Nigeria Police Force, was promoted to the rank of assistant inspector general by the Police Service Commission in May 2022, and retired with that rank and his pension.
I have no triumphal statement. Rather, I register the melancholy one: an accusation of this magnitude, pressed with all the weight of the State and then simply abandoned, judged by no one, leaves everyone in worse conditions, the accused, whose claim is incomplete because it has never been formally pronounced; the accusers, whose motives are always open to discussion; and the audience, who were promised responsibility and who were granted only spectacle. Accountability via ambush is no accountability at all.
It is the personalization of institutions, and the institutions personalized in one season will be transformed, in the next, into the same hands that personalized them.
The confiscation of MalamiIl’s properties which brings us to this week’s sentencing.
In January this year, at the request of the EFCC, Justice Emeka Nwite of the Federal High Court ordered the provisional confiscation of fifty-seven properties, hotels, residential buildings, schools, lands and a printing press in Kebbi, Kano and the Federal Capital Territory, which the Commission estimated are worth about two hundred and thirteen billion naira and linked to the former Attorney General and two of his sons.
The interim order did what interim confiscation orders do: it preserved the assets and invited all those who claimed them to come and show why they should not be permanently confiscated.
On Wednesday, Judge Joyce Abdulmalik issued the final ruling.
Forty-eight of the properties were ultimately forfeited to the federal government, as the court found that the Commission had established reasonable suspicion that they were proceeds of illicit activities and that the defendants had failed to demonstrate the lawful origin of the funds with which they were acquired.
Nine properties, in Kebbi and Kaduna, were released as the court found the Commission’s evidence against them to be deficient.
Separately, and importantly separately, Mr Malami, his son and his wife face sixteen money laundering charges involving approximately 8.7 billion naira, which remain to be tried.
It is important that the public understands exactly what happened in that courtroom, because a seizure of this kind is widely misunderstood.
This was a seizure without conviction: a civil proceeding directed against the property itself, not the person, asking not “is this man guilty of a crime” but, in the trial judge’s own framing, how legitimate the funds with which these assets were acquired were.
Architecture is familiar to every professional in this field.
The Commission submits to the judge elements that establish a reasonable suspicion that the assets are the proceeds of an illicit activity; the court orders provisional forfeiture and public notice; and the burden of proof then shifts to those who claim the assets to explain, with credible documents and testimonies, the legitimate income from which that wealth could have come.
If the explanation is given, the property is released, as nine of these properties were.
Where it is not, the deduction permitted by law is drawn.
Readers of my work will recognize this as the very issue to which I have devoted a three-volume study: the problem of unexplained wealth, of assets grossly disproportionate to any known legitimate income of their holder, and of a legal system that has decided, correctly in my opinion, that such wealth can be called upon to explain itself.
Two caveats follow, and I express them emphatically.
First of all, forfeiture is not a sentence.
Mr. Malami was not convicted of anything; the criminal charge against him and his family remains to be judged, and he enjoys there, in full measure, the presumption of innocence that the Constitution extends to every accused, together with the right to appeal against the confiscation itself.
It has vigorously contested the proceedings, accusing the Commission of inflating the value of the assets, and it is its right to press any such point through any lawful avenue.
Secondly, the release of the nine properties deserves the same attention as the confiscation of the forty-eight, because it demonstrates that the court behaved like a tribunal and not like a rubber stamp: the Commission was put to the test, and where its test failed, it lost.
Both halves of the sentence, forfeiture and release, are the system that works.
The Wheel and What It Teaches I am aware of the irony and refuse to gloat about it.
The official who once catalogued, in a memo addressed to the President, the alleged failures of the EFCC in the management of recovered assets, now observes the Commission’s own asset recovery mechanism applied to assets associated with him.
The prosecutor of one season became the respondent of another, just as the EFCC chairman who succeeded Magu was, in turn, suspended and detained.
There is a lesson in this procession, and it is not an economic one.
The fact is that in a Republic governed by law, the mechanism of accountability survives every minister who manages it, and must do so; that those who hold extraordinary powers should exercise them with the humility of men who may one day find themselves having to suffer; and that the only lasting protection available to any public official is not the position, or the connection, but the integrity of the process itself, kept scrupulously fair to all, because everyone can need it.
The contrast taking place between 2020 and 2026 is in itself instructive.
Magu’s assessment was conducted by an ad hoc commission, behind closed doors, on an unpublished report, and ended in silence.
Malami’s confiscation was conducted in a public hearing, on motions discussed and ruled on, by judges whose reasons are on record and whose orders can be appealed.
Whatever the views of either man, the second process is the constitutional one, and the difference between the two is the difference that this article has spent years urging: accountability through institutions, in public, on the evidence, with rights of defense and appeal, rather than accountability by the presidential committee, leaks, and neglect.
The 2022 reform that placed the recovery and management of criminal assets on a legal basis, with the Proceeds of Crime (Recovery and Management) Act, was Parliament’s response to the very controversies over recovered assets on which the Magu case was built; the courts’ increasing mastery of non-conviction-based confiscation jurisdiction is the judiciary’s contribution; and what remains is the discipline to apply these tools uniformly, both to allies and adversaries of each government, because an anti-corruption law that bends to the political wind is not law but time.
I would like to conclude as a lawyer should, with the files.
Six years ago I argued that my client was entitled to a fair trial, confrontation, evidence and a published outcome, and today I maintain, with perfect consistency, that Mr Malami is entitled to exactly the same right: a fair trial of the charges, a fair hearing on any appeal and a judgment on the evidence rather than on irony.
The promise of the law is not that the mighty will fall; is that everyone, powerful and small, accusers and accused, will be judged according to the same rules, in broad daylight, on the basis of the evidence.
That promise failed Ibrahim Magu in 2020 in the way he was treated, whatever the merit; it is currently held in the Federal High Court in 2026.
The wheel of responsibility turns slowly in Nigeria, but this week it turned in public, conspicuously and with purpose.
This is progress, and those of us who keep the rule of law’s records should say so, record it carefully, and insist that it keeps rolling no matter which gate stops before the next.
Dr Wahab Shittu is a Senior Lawyer of Nigeria, SAN
July 15, 2026
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