by Mohammed Bello Doka
When exactly did Nigeria decide that a convicted pension thief should double as a national whistleblower? At what point did public memory become so short that a man Premium Times itself describes as a “pension thief” could stride back into the spotlight, accuse a former Attorney-General, and expect applause rather than disbelief? And who, precisely, advised Abdulrasheed Maina that this was a good idea?
Those questions hang over Nigeria’s public space today, heavy with irony and dripping with unintended comedy. Maina’s recent re-emergence, complete with bold accusations against former Attorney-General of the Federation Abubakar Malami, SAN, was not the exposé he may have imagined. It was something far more revealing: a masterclass in self-inflicted political damage.
Let us be clear from the outset. Abdulrasheed Maina is not a misunderstood technocrat, nor a persecuted reformer. He is a man convicted in 2021 by the Federal High Court for pension fraud and money laundering involving over ₦2 billion meant for Nigerian retirees. That conviction occurred while Abubakar Malami was Attorney-General, a fact Maina’s defenders cite endlessly but rarely interrogate honestly. The courts found Maina guilty. History recorded it. That alone should have consigned him to a long season of silence.
Yet Maina chose visibility.
Instead of staying low-key, rehabilitating quietly, or pursuing any grievances through lawful channels, he opted for the loudest possible re-entry into public life: press conferences, viral videos, and sweeping claims about alleged loots linked to Malami. In doing so, he did not expose a grand conspiracy. He exposed himself.
There are only two plausible explanations for Maina’s behaviour, and both are devastating.
The first is vengeance. Maina’s conviction and incarceration took place under Malami’s watch as Nigeria’s chief law officer. While Malami did not personally prosecute him, the symbolism is unavoidable. To a man nursing resentment, the Attorney-General becomes the face of an unforgiving system. From this angle, Maina’s outburst looks less like whistleblowing and more like emotional retaliation dressed up as civic duty. The problem is that vengeance is not evidence, and bitterness is not reform. Courts do not run on grudges, and public opinion rarely rewards them for long.
The second explanation is even darker. It is the possibility that Maina was hired — deployed as a disposable messenger to do the dirty work others preferred not to touch. Nigerian politics is no stranger to this tactic. Compromised figures are sometimes used to air allegations precisely because they can be disowned at the first sign of trouble. If this was the case, then whoever unleashed Maina either displayed staggering incompetence or harboured deeper grudges against Maina than against Malami. Either way, the outcome was the same: Maina walked into the arena naked, while those who may have nudged him forward melted into the shadows.
In both scenarios, Maina loses. Completely.
The backlash was swift. Public outrage followed. Institutions recoiled. The Nigerian Bar Association’s Garki Branch episode — where Maina was controversially honoured before the national NBA leadership publicly disowned the action — became the defining moment. It was not Malami’s name that took the reputational beating; it was Maina’s. Again. The man who came to accuse ended up standing trial once more — not in a courtroom, but in the unforgiving court of public opinion.
At the heart of this tragicomedy lies a dangerous false equivalence: the attempt to place Abdulrasheed Maina and Abubakar Malami on the same moral plane. They do not belong there.
Maina is a convicted looter of pension funds — money meant for elderly Nigerians who laboured their entire lives and depended on the state for dignity in retirement. Malami, whatever his critics say, was the state’s chief legal weapon against looters. Disliking Malami’s politics does not erase the factual record of his tenure. Conflating the two is not analysis; it is intellectual dishonesty.
From November 2015 to May 2023, Abubakar Malami served as Attorney-General and Minister of Justice under President Muhammadu Buhari, anchoring Nigeria’s most aggressive asset recovery drive since the return to democracy. Empowered by Section 174 of the 1999 Constitution, Malami led efforts that recovered and protected assets valued at over $2.5 billion — cash, properties, luxury items, and strategic economic interests wrestled back from powerful hands.
The Abacha loot recoveries alone tell a story Maina can never tell. In 2020, Malami concluded a trilateral agreement with the United States and the Bailiwick of Jersey that repatriated $311.8 million traced to the Abacha era. Those funds were not hidden in private vaults; they were transparently channelled into critical infrastructure such as the Abuja–Kano Expressway, Lagos–Ibadan Expressway, and the Second Niger Bridge under the supervision of the Nigeria Sovereign Investment Authority. Switzerland had earlier returned $321 million in 2017. The United Kingdom followed with £4.2 million and $20.6 million in 2022. These were not symbolic victories; they were material recoveries that unsettled entrenched beneficiaries of corruption.
Malami’s reach extended beyond cash. Over 400 properties linked to Abacha were seized domestically. Estates worth tens of billions of naira tied to former Delta State governor James Ibori were recovered. Luxury vehicles, jewellery, and even a $22 million yacht traced to illicit wealth were brought under state control. Each recovery created enemies. Each success closed a door that powerful interests had relied on for decades.
Then there was Malabu. In the infamous OPL 245 scandal, Malami coordinated recoveries amounting to $73.2 million and seized assets worth over ₦673 million, confronting oil barons who had thrived in the shadows of opaque deals. In Ajaokuta, he slashed Nigeria’s potential liability from $5.258 billion to $496 million, saving the country from an economic haemorrhage that had enriched intermediaries while paralysing a strategic industrial asset. At the international level, his legal team defeated a $1.2 billion claim against Nigeria at the International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes in the Interocean Oil case, shielding the country from foreign profiteering.
These victories were not accidents. They were the product of sustained legal strategy, political will, and an understanding that corruption is not merely about stealing money — it is about bleeding a nation slowly and silently. Malami’s push for the Proceeds of Crime (Recovery and Management) Act 2022 further institutionalised transparency, ensuring recovered assets were managed for public benefit rather than recycled into new forms of plunder.
This is why Malami attracts hostility. Asset recovery is not an abstract moral crusade; it is a zero-sum confrontation. Every dollar returned is a dollar lost by someone who once considered it untouchable. Every court victory collapses a network of influence. Seen in this light, the barrage of accusations, insinuations, and proxy attacks becomes less mysterious.
Against this backdrop, Maina’s performance reads not as bravery but as miscalculation. Whether driven by personal vengeance or deployed as a political tool, he chose the worst possible path. He reminded Nigerians of his crimes. He invited renewed scrutiny. He triggered institutional rejection. If the goal was to damage Malami, it failed spectacularly. If the goal was to destroy what remained of Maina’s credibility, it succeeded beyond expectation.
There is a lesson here, and it extends beyond the two men at the centre of this drama. Nigeria’s anti-corruption discourse cannot survive on spectacle alone. Allegations matter, but so do credibility, motive, and method. When compromised actors step forward as moral arbiters, they often end up strengthening the very systems they claim to oppose.
In the end, this episode will not be remembered as the moment Malami was unmasked. It will be remembered as the moment Abdulrasheed Maina spoke when silence would have been smarter — and discovered, too late, that the spotlight is unforgiving to those with too much history and too little standing.
That is the tragicomedy. And Maina is its only casualty.
Mohammed Bello Doka can be reached via [email protected]
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