By: Comrd. Usman Abdulkadir Taleeki
In his pamphlet titled Common Sense, Thomas Paine pleaded with readers not to judge his direction without reading the piece in its entirety. I also plead with you to do the same with this write-up. Do not judge anything here without going through it completely. Kindly follow step by step as I take you to a logical conclusion.
I am fond of narrating this story to people.
In 2018, someone collected fifty thousand dollars, which is equivalent to about seventy-two million naira today, from a friend of our late father, the Magajin Garin Sokoto. The person claimed he would use the money to secure a nolle prosequi from the then Attorney General of the Federation, Abubakar Malami SAN.
When the man who gave the money waited for long without hearing anything, he later followed the Magajin Gari to visit the Attorney General. During the discussion, the Magajin Gari asked Malami about the favour the person claimed he was pursuing on his behalf.
Malami’s response was simple and honest. He said the person who made that promise clearly did not know him. If he truly knew Malami, he would have known that a nolle prosequi is not something Malami would ever grant as a personal favour. He advised the Magajin Gari to tell his friend to go back and recover his fifty thousand dollars from the person who deceived him.
This is the mentality of Abubakar Malami.
There was another moment when Malami was discussing the issue of invoking a nolle prosequi with his then Permanent Secretary and Solicitor General of the Federation, Dayo Apata. Malami told him, “If any of my children, God forbid, is ever involved in a dispute while I am Attorney General, the only thing I can do for him is to get him good lawyers to prove his innocence. I cannot exercise the power of nolle for him, nor ask any Attorney General in the future to do so in his favour.”
These were not empty words. They reflected the integrity of the man. Throughout his time in office, Malami was determined not to abuse his powers. He placed the interest of Nigeria and the interest of justice above personal relationships, pressure, and sentiment.
There are countless other incidents that speak to his integrity and his firm adherence to the rule of law. It is therefore misleading and dishonest for anyone to push cooked-up stories about him without a single piece of real evidence.
But good people hardly ever have it easy. The road of integrity is never smooth. As the saying goes, if you fight corruption, corruption will fight you back. What we are seeing today is simply part of that resistance. It is the pushback that every honest public servant must face.
Like every storm, this too will pass. When the dust settles and the noise fades, Malami will stand where he has always stood, on the side of principle, on the side of the law, and on the side of a clean conscience.
Beyond this, follow me in this piece as I outline some of the systematic changes Malami introduced into Nigeria’s system which, in my own perception, make him the finest anti-corruption fighter since the return of democracy and the beginning of the Fourth Republic. Nobody has fought corruption like Malami, with visible and verifiable reforms. Yes, you can fact-check me after reading.
Malami’s work was not about noise. It was about building lasting systems that attack corruption at its foundation.
It began in 2017 when he introduced the National Anti-Corruption Strategy. This was not just another government memo. It was a serious policy that directed Ministries, Departments, and Agencies to establish internal mechanisms to monitor and prevent corruption within their own operations. Over eight hundred government offices were covered under this framework. The idea was simple. Instead of waiting until money is stolen, put checks in place to prevent it from being stolen in the first place.
By 2019, Malami moved into an area many people ignored, stamp duty revenues. For years, banks and government institutions collected stamp duties on transfers, contracts, and official documents, yet billions of naira were either unaccounted for or deliberately hidden. Malami raised the alarm and demanded proper remittance from banks and institutions. It was one of the rare moments in government when someone directly confronted the financial system over missing public funds. This marked the beginning of the Stamp Duty Revenue Accountability Drive.
In 2020 came one of the most significant legal reforms Nigeria had witnessed in decades, the Companies and Allied Matters Act, CAMA 2020. For over thirty years, Nigeria’s company law had remained outdated. Malami pushed for its reform, and the new law became a major blow against corruption. One of its strongest provisions now compels every company to declare its beneficial owners, not just the fronts, but the real individuals benefiting from the business. This single reform shook the roots of corruption by making it harder for public officials to hide stolen funds through anonymous or fake companies.
In 2022, Nigeria, under Malami’s leadership, enacted the Proceeds of Crime (Recovery and Management) Act. Before then, Nigeria lacked a unified legal framework for recovering, managing, and returning stolen assets. Different agencies operated with different rules, and recovered assets often disappeared again. This law provided clarity on how to trace, seize, manage, and transparently utilize recovered assets. It reduced inter-agency conflict and minimized the risk of re-looting recovered funds. It was not a press statement. It was structure.
That same year, Malami defended Nigeria in one of the most dangerous financial traps in modern history, the Process and Industrial Developments (P&ID) case. A fraudulent contract signed years earlier had exposed Nigeria to a potential ten-billion-dollar liability. Malami pursued the case internationally, exposed the fraud, and saved the country from economic disaster.
Under his supervision, Nigeria also recovered over three hundred and twenty-two million dollars from the Abacha loot, particularly from Switzerland. What made this recovery different was the transparency he insisted upon. The funds were tied directly to the Conditional Cash Transfer Programme for poor households. He ensured the money did not disappear again. He also blocked exploitative arrangements by foreign lawyers seeking excessive fees. This stands today as a major achievement of the Abacha Loot Recovery and Repatriation Framework.
Malami also believed that the fight against corruption must be clean on all sides. When officials within anti-corruption agencies abused power, he did not look away. He demanded accountability even within institutions meant to enforce the law. That courage laid the foundation for internal accountability within anti-corruption agencies, a rare stance in Nigerian public service.
These were not mere talks. They were laws, policies, reforms, and actions. They touched the financial system, the legal framework, and Nigeria’s international obligations. Malami blocked loopholes, rewrote outdated laws, recovered stolen wealth, and strengthened institutions.
His work was not loud, but it was deep. It left behind a foundation that future administrations can build upon.
If we are being sincere, truly sincere, we must admit that since the return of democracy, no one has fought corruption with the kind of strategic legal depth and reform-driven courage that Abubakar Malami brought to the table. Whether one likes him or not is irrelevant. When it comes to facts, laws, money saved, and systems strengthened, Malami stands out.
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