By Sonala Olumhense, July 19, 2026
The curiosities of life: Last Wednesday, exactly one year from the burial of former President Muhammadu Buhari, his son-in-law, Abubakar Malami, was humiliated in a courtroom in Abuja.
Malami served for eight years as Buhari’s Attorney-General and, no kidding, Minister of Justice.
Abuja is the city in the sky in which Buhari swore that, armed with the presidency, he would CHANGE Nigeria for good. He was lying; he made Nigeria even filthier than he had met it.
Abuja is where, together, Buhari and Malami one day in June 2020 snatched off the streets Ibrahim Magu, the chairman of the EFCC, threw him behind bars, accused him of corruption, and tried him in secret by a panel led by Justice Ayo Salami.
Malami could do no wrong: a few months later, Buhari gave him a critical assignment: to sell, within six months, all assets that had been forfeited to the government.
Deeply satisfied, Buhari even promoted Malami: giving him his daughter. Life was good.
Two important things then followed. First, after they had publicly buried Magu’s career, Buhari and Malami secretly buried the Justice Salami report.
The second: because that secrecy thing was serving the Buhari conglomerate so well, they extended it to what I have called the Malami Market: the thousands of federal government assets.
They did not list the items openly. They did not value them openly. They did not say who bought what, if anything. Like the Justice Salami business, the Malami Market was family business: neither Buhari nor Malami would account to Nigeria.
In Nigeria, power often appears to interfere as much with our mathematical abilities as with our auditory abilities. Perhaps because “In the mountains, we forget to count the days.”
We forget that relentless countdown clock. Which is why, in May 2023, Buhari’s time in the Abuja mountains of power ended, even as he threatened to leave the country for Niger if anyone called him a Yahoo-Yahoo president.
Malami also found he could not extend his time at Abuja’s Plot 71B Shehu Shagari Way.
But Time did not. It let the EFCC back in: that same agency Malami had beheaded so cruelly three years earlier. The EFCC was asking questions concerning the legality of some of Malami’s wealth, eventually seeking permanent forfeiture of 57 properties valued at N212.8 billion.
To Malami, it must have sounded like a joke: the same EFCC that, just yesterday, he could spit on or spit out, asking questions about his wealth.
But it dragged him before a judge. And last Wednesday, the Federal High Court in Abuja agreed with the commission, ordering the forfeiture of 48 of those properties.
Judge Joyce Abdulmalik affirmed that the issue before the court was not who owned the properties, but the legitimacy of the funds used to acquire them, adding that the defendants had “not dislodged the reasonable suspicion that the property was acquired by unlawful activities.”
She also declined the forfeiture request on nine other properties, deciding that the EFCC was not convincing that they were illegitimately acquired. She asserted that ownership explanations were not disproved, and that mere association or proximity to another person could not justify forfeiture.
Because justice must always come first, I celebrate the wisdom of Judge Abdulmalik. The case again exposed the shoddiness of the EFCC that various courts have lampooned for two decades. Remember that just last month in London, the National Crime Agency lost the prosecution of Diezani Alison-Madueke on account of the EFCC. “Either you trust the EFCC, or you don’t,” was the defence’s big hammer.
Given the agency’s monumental prosecution failures, the Malami 48-property forfeiture is a major success.
But remember: Malami and two members of his family are jointly facing trial on N8.7 billion money laundering charges. Nigeria’s so-called anti-corruption agencies are loud and visible when it comes to nameless offenders and asset recovery. When confronted with high-profile offenders, they choke or wilt, repeatedly erring on the side of keeping them out of jail.
Malami presents a peculiar challenge because we have fallen for his misdirection. We are chasing what he did during the night, in his spare time. But the real issue should be what he did during the day, as AG and presidential son-in-law. That was when neither he nor President Buhari cared about justice, as in the Magu case, about which I pleaded.
And that was when, right before our eyes, Malami unveiled his real talent: the magic to sell off thousands of federal assets worth trillions of naira with absolutely no accountability.
The presidency said nothing.
The National Assembly said nothing.
Civil society said nothing.
The mass media said nothing.
Now that he has just come out of a courtroom where he was examined for 57 properties valued at over N212 billion, we are foolish to accept his silence as the guarantee that he conducted that business as defined and deposited every kobo into the government account.
Not only is that contrary to democratic practice, but it is precisely how:
- The Senate Committee on Public Accounts “suddenly” discoversthat the Auditor-General has for six years flagged N210 trillion discrepancies in the accounts of the NNPC;
- A former Accountant General of the Federation is in court on allegations of a N109bn fraud;
- Yahaya Bello, a former governor being tried for corruption by the EFCC in cases that total about N200bn, is awarded a Senatorial ticket by the APC; and
- The Senate, forever incapable of confronting its mortality in the oversight mirror, twice blocks an independent probe into the presidency’s own fake-agency scandal.
Because these are the games that got us here, into despair. As Buhari proved in the secret Magu trial and Tinubu has proved in his abandoned Jim Obazee investigation, leadership is not about serving the people; it is pretending to be serving the people.
We now have 30 days in which to demonstrate whether Nigeria’s anti-graft machinery can reach the corridors of power it characteristically avoids. Are we about to violate the Betta Edu standard, or vindicate it?
The point is that the PFIPC thing is not new. It is just different and will disappear with no significant stones overturned.
Remember: the Ministry of Justice has not released the Malami Market report. No lawyer has demanded it, wielding the FOIA, nor has the media. No civil society organisation has wept in the streets.
In June 2023, I warned that Nigeria was dispensing with character.
The Nigerian state protects ethical malfeasance, especially if it looks really bad. Every aspect of our lives since May 1999 proves this.
And so, we repeatedly and greedily supply for ourselves from the commonwealth, even as we enter our late years. And when you are so “accomplished,” you expect also to live forever. We are led by greed, on steroids
We mine, we gather and we snatch: in and from the local councils, the states, and the MDAs. Parastatals. Foreign missions. The Presidency.
We make the budget, we pad the budget, and we loot the budget.
The only question is, how do we live forever? Or buy time to spend this wealth…and gloat?
