Police chief suspected of corruption resigns

The head of Nigeria’s police force, Tafa Balogun, has resigned as a government corruption watchdog investigates suspicions that he diverted large sums of public money for his personal use. Nuhu Ribadu, chairman of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC), Nigeria’s economic crimes watchdog, said that bank accounts holding over one billion naira (US $7.5 million) suspected to be public funds had been traced to Balogun. Another EFCC official said the former police chief was likely to face trial for corruption. Ribadu said the the corruption watchdog had reported its findings to President Olusegun Obasanjo and this had triggered Balogun's surprise resignation on Monday night. “It’s the work we carried out that led to…that decision,” Ribadu told the BBC's Hausa language service Tuesday night. Balogun’s “voluntary retirement” as Inspector General of Police was announced in a terse statement by the president's office. Sunday Ehindero, one of Balogun's deputies, was named as his replacement. Ehindero has been outlining a programme to strengthen the police force since taking charge two days ago, but Balogun has not been seen or heard in public since the announcement of his departure from office. “We’re still investigating him, but I can tell you that 11 different accounts were traced to him in one bank alone,” Suleiman Ajibade, spokesman for the EFCC told IRIN. While he would not provide details of the sources of the funds found in the accounts, Ajibade said Balogun was likely to face corruption charges at the end of the current investigations. Nigeria’s police force has often been accused of brutality and extra-judicial killings while faring poorly in dealing with burgeoning crime and frequent eruptions of ethnic and religious violence across the country of more than 126 million people. In 2004, Nigeria was ranked 144 on the 146-nation Corruption Perceptions Index published by Berlin-based Transparency International. That left only Bangladesh and Haiti as worse-placed. Under Obasanjo’s five-year-old administration there has been a new emphasis on better funding and training to improve the crime-fighting abilities of the 200,000-strong force. Balogun took office in 2002, but weekly newspaper The News, accused him last year of diverting huge sums from the police budget into private accounts. The newspaper also published pictures of posh buildings in different parts of the country which Balogun had allegedly acquired with illicit funds.