Olaolu Adegbite Becomes EFCC Director of Operations

 Olaolu Adegbite

The Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) has appointed Chief Superintendent of Police Olaolu Adegbite as its new Director of Operations.  Adegbite is an experienced officer who previously served as the head of the Advance Fee Fraud unit of the EFCC in Lagos.
As was the case with several of the EFCC’s core staff in its early days, Adegbite trained with the Federal Bureau of Investigations academy in the United States and worked with several international police investigations to track 419 operators in Nigeria. 
Many of those highly-trained personnel, some of whom investigated corrupt federal officials and state governors for years, were dispersed by the former EFCC chairman, Mrs. Farida Waziri, when she took over the leadership of the Commission from Nuhu Ribadu.
Adegbite graduated from the University of Lagos in 1988, and obtained a Masters Degree from Pushkin Institute Moscow Russia (1991). He had professional training at the Nigeria Police Academy, ILEA Gaborone Botswana, FBI National Academy Quantico Virginia and ILEA Roswell New Mexico.

The position of Director of Operations is a key one in the EFCC, and has been held twice by its current chairman, Ibrahim Lamorde, first in 2003 at the establishment of the commission.  In 2009, Mr. Lamorde, returned to his old post as the government, under pressure by the international community to combat corruption in the country.
The appointment of Adegbite to the commission's operations department is another indication of Mr. Lamorde’s desire to make the agency more combative, but since his appointment in November 2011, analysts say it has lacked teeth. 
“What we need is for Mr. Lamorde to unveil decisive, unprecedented action to prosecute some of the bastions of corruption in the country, not just continue to act as if he intends to,” one of them told SaharaReporters.  “Assuming he is really serious, how does he know how long he will last as chairman?”