THE SATURDAY PROFILE
By ADAM NOSSITER
Published: November 22, 2013
ABUJA, Nigeria — The cash was handed over in large sacks containing $15 million in $100 bills, bags so heavy that the stoop-shouldered civil servant needed help carrying them.
Afolabi Sotunde for The New York Times
Nuhu Ribadu, Nigeria’s anticorruption commissioner, on Friday.
James Ibori, the governor of an oil-rich state in southern Nigeria, was so desperate to escape prosecution on corruption charges that he tried to pay off the civil servant, Nuhu Ribadu, Nigeria’s anticorruption commissioner. Mr. Ribadu accepted the money, but it was all a ruse.
A bespectacled former police officer with the no-nonsense style of a G-man, Mr. Ribadu did not keep the money, a remarkable act in a nation where corruption is endemic. Instead he deposited it in a government bank vault, evidence of Mr. Ibori’s many misdeeds, and in 2007 Mr. Ibori was arrested. Ultimately the charges did not stick — the governor was acquitted by a Nigerian court. He was eventually convicted of money laundering and conspiracy to defraud in Britain, where he had stashed a hefty chunk of the hundreds of millions of dollars of oil money he was believed to have embezzled.
The outcome of the case is in many ways an emblem of Mr. Ribadu’s career as a corruption fighter in Nigeria, a country Colin L. Powell once called a nation of “marvelous scammers”: a string of partial victories against a seemingly unbeatable foe.
These days Mr. Ribadu sits at home in a government-issue villa in this prefab 1980s-era capital, ruminating on his next move.
At 53, he has been celebrated inside Nigeria and beyond for his five-year tenure as chief of the anticorruption unit, beginning in 2003.
In that time he built the unit, called the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, into Nigeria’s largest anticorruption agency, with over 1,200 employees in six offices across Nigeria. He successfully prosecuted in 2005 Tafa Balogun, an inspector general of police who had resigned. Mr. Balogun pleaded guilty to failing to declare his assets. Mr. Ribadu arrested Mr. Ibori, the former governor of Delta State, in December 2007. He prosecuted 10 prominent national public figures, including nine governors.
His reputation gained luster only after he was forced from office in 2008 and into exile after what he said were assassination attempts, after he tried to prosecute corrupt politicians. He was appointed a visiting fellow at the Center for Global Development in Washington and was also a senior fellow at St. Athony’s College, Oxford.
He returned to Nigeria to run for president in 2011, but came nowhere near victory, and since then has struggled to find a place in Nigerian public life. He continues to investigate graft, but with a less prominent platform. His report pointing out large-scale corruption and waste in the country’s oil industry, which was published last year, was ignored by the government that commissioned it.
“One of my very big disappointments,” Mr. Ribadu said intently in an interview here.
Still, he remains a unique figure, prominent in the political opposition and often named as a possible future candidate for office.
“For the generality of the people, he is a dogged anticorruption crusader,” said Femi Falana, a prominent Nigerian human rights lawyer. “For the corrupt elements that constitute the political class, they fear him.”
Since Mr. Ribadu’s abrupt ouster as head of the anticorruption agency, “there is a feeling that the war on corruption is a lost battle,” Mr. Falana said.
The anticorruption fight appears to be on sabbatical in the garden of Mr. Ribadu’s home here.
“Most people you will have encountered will want to ‘settle’ you,” the soft-spoken Mr. Ribadu said in an interview in the garden, using a Nigerian term for a bribe. “Up to my last day at work, people were trying to bribe me. That is the shocking thing.”
Mr. Ribadu began his career as a street police officer in some of Lagos’s rougher neighborhoods, eventually rising to become the chief prosecutor for the Nigerian police. He speaks with a piercing intensity, sometimes clenching a fist to punctuate a point. He grew up deep in Nigeria’s northern hinterland in the town of Yola. It was a devout Muslim household and a “refuge against pain and injustice” that succored persecuted lepers, he wrote in his autobiography.
His father was a member of Parliament in the days before independence and later a minister in Nigeria’s first government. He did not die wealthy, a fact noted by Mr. Ribadu as proof of his integrity and a sharp contrast to the “obscene value of aggrandizement that has suffocated our national life,” as he put it in his book.
But his reputation is not entirely unblemished. Some critics have accused his office of selectively prosecuting enemies of the man who appointed him, Olusegun Obasanjo, the president at the time. Indeed, before the national elections in 2007, Mr. Ribadu’s office published a list of 135 “corrupt” candidates it said should not be allowed to run for office. None of Mr. Obasanjo’s close allies were on it, noted Human Rights Watch, an advocacy group. Other critics said that the agency used the country’s gruesome prisons to obtain guilty pleas from defendants seeking to avoid long trials and long stays in fetid, overcrowded cells.
Human Rights Watch said in August 2011 that Mr. Ribadu’s “legacy was tarnished” by such evidence.
Detractors also point to his modest tally, when it was all over, as chairman of the corruption commission: only two convictions.
Yet even the critics call these a watershed, demonstrating to Nigerians that the powerful could be brought down merely because they had stolen large sums of money.
It “was a profoundly important moment” when Nigeria’s top police official, Mr. Balogun, was taken to court in handcuffs in 2005 to answer for his $150 million in ill-gotten assets, Human Rights Watch said in a 2011 report that was otherwise critical of Mr. Ribadu’s record.
That feat, and the subsequent conviction of another oil-state governor for stealing $55 million — since pardoned by the current president, Goodluck Jonathan — contributed to Mr. Ribadu’s reputation for incorruptibility.
He remains a rare figure in Nigerian political life: a public man whose reputation for personal probity remains relatively intact. No one has credibly accused him of stealing or taking bribes. Chickens roam his lawn, his six children romp on the grounds and watch cartoons inside, and there is no elaborate security detail guarding him — a sharp contrast to the normal accouterments of Nigerian senior officials.
It remains to be seen if Mr. Ribadu’s incorruptible image can vault him into politics. After announcing a bid for the presidency to much fanfare last time around, Mr. Ribadu finished a very distant third. The jockeying is now underway in Nigeria for the 2015 presidential election, a high-stakes game on which billions ride in this oil-producing nation, and Mr. Ribadu is not ruling out a new candidacy.
The odds are against him: The governing People’s Democratic Party., with oceans of cash and a network of influential state governors, is arrayed against Mr. Ribadu, who has not much besides the news media and a handful of good-government boosters on his side.
But Mr. Ribadu is convinced that his moment will arrive. Seven governors from the governing party have recently quit to form a splinter group. Mr. Jonathan’s party faces many problems, like an Islamist rebellion in the north and potentially plummeting revenues from oil after the United States, Nigeria’s biggest customer, cut imports from the country in half from 2011 to the first half of 2012.
The defections have noticeably rattled Mr. Jonathan’s government.
“It’s an implosion of the ruling party that has been in charge for 15 years, promoting corruption, selfishness, incompetence,” Mr. Ribadu said, leaning forward in his garden. “It’s gotten to the point where it’s just like a group of gangsters.”
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: November 23, 2013
An earlier version of this article misspelled part of the name of the University of Oxford college where Nuhu Ribadu was a visiting fellow. It is St. Antony’s College, not St. Anthony’s.
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