It is a singular honour and pleasure to welcome you to the opening session of the First NFIU Management Retreat this morning. I’m particularly delighted with the participation of a wide range of our partners and stakeholders, senior government officials at the highest level, law enforcement and supervisory authorities, representatives of the private sector, and the international community.
This is a testament to the importance of the efforts we are collectively making to combat the many serious challenges that face us as a nation as we seek to protect our global economic systems from the threats of money laundering, terrorist financing, proliferation financing of small arms and weapons of mass destruction, violent crimes, and other serious organized crimes.
On the mandate of the NFIU, I’m going to quote the words of Mr. President and Commander-in-Chief of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, Bola Ahmed Tinubu GCFR, who in the year 2022, as a presidential candidate, said, “We’re not here to do what is comfortable. We’re here to do what is right for our people and our country. We’re here to answer to a greater, higher calling. The calling is the love of Nigeria. We dare not miss this chance because we cannot be sure of another one”.
The NFIU sits at the nexus of the law enforcement and regulatory architecture, underpinning the country’s anti-money laundering and counter-financing of terrorism and proliferation framework. Our primary role is to ensure that we are able to leverage the multiple sources of information and data we have access to in order to provide national and international competent authorities with the intelligence they require to investigate crimes and prosecute criminals.
This role, by necessity, ensures that we must take a collaborative approach to our work. We recognize that without all of you, from the institutions that act as gatekeepers to the competent authorities that follow the move, the prosecutors and judiciary that ensure appropriate sanctions are applied for violations of the law. Our work counts for very little.
Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you a summary of the steps we have taken to ensure that we effectively play our role in this collective endeavour to protect our national and economic security and the phenomenal achievements recorded since my assumption of office. Recognizing the moral threats, we face, the dynamic nature of the criminal environment and the vulnerabilities that exist within our domestic context, we developed and implemented a robust and innovative organizational structure which aligns our capacities and resources to the sectors of the economy that are most vulnerable to abuse by money launderers and terrorist financiers. This allows us to prioritize our response and resources to the highest-risk predicate offences in our country and enables us to better serve our stakeholders and partners with timely, credible, and actionable intelligence, as well as facilitating more effective cooperation with all of them.
To support this new structure, we embarked on a strategic re-engagement exercise. Most of the chief executive officers in this room would have at some point in the past few months received a visit from the management of the NFIU. The purpose of this visit was to receive direct feedback from the agencies we work with on a daily basis and to use these interactions to improve our operations.
These engagements have led to the establishment of several joint task forces and interagency committees to strengthen our mutual cooperation in tackling criminal activity.
We have also engaged extensively with the private sector, who provides source reports that have been invaluable in shaping our internal operations. I would like to reassure you that we do not intend to rest on our oars, and this is the primary focus of convening this session. At the retreat that the management of the NFIU will be embarking upon over the next few days, we will continue to enhance our domestic cooperation.
Our goal is to be able to contribute on a real-time basis to ongoing law enforcement and regulatory actions. We will prioritize engagement and collaboration to enhance public, private, and private-private partnerships in order to ensure that we leverage on the depth and breadth of information that hitherto has been held in multiple silos.
Today, we will hear from our stakeholders and partners, and we will listen to you carefully as you provide us with your opinion on how we can continue to improve our performance.
We will take these lessons with us as we develop and refine what I expect to be an ambitious five-year strategic plan, which I hope to share with all of you in the next few weeks. We have already identified a number of key objectives that we will be delivering on. We will focus on capacity building internally and externally.
We are already taking steps towards this with the establishment of the NFIU Training Centre which is intended to be a regional centre of excellence, serving both public and private sector stakeholders across the continent. And I’m pleased to note that our stakeholders and international partners and some strategic global agencies have already committed their support to this project.
The NFIU has also strengthened its technology platforms with the planned deployment of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and machine learning tools to assist us in our operational duties in the analysis of information and data in order to fast-track our processes.
The crimes record information management system, aptly called CRIMS, has been deployed to more competent authorities and states of the Federation to further support information sharing through a secured and accredited tool. Furthermore, recognizing that our remit extends beyond the borders of Nigeria and also that the nature of serious crime is transnational and the proceed of crimes moves no boundaries, no borders, we are strengthening our international partnership.
Apart from being the permanent secretary for the West African Forum of FIUs covering 17 member states in Africa, we have taken a lead role in reintegrating the Lake Chad and Sahel network of FIUs, which are operating to tackle terrorism financing. The NFIU was also elected in June 2024 as the vice chair of the prestigious global economic forum of FIUs with a membership of 177 countries, and I think this is a phenomenal feat for NFIU.
The NFIU continues to support our fellow FIUs in the West African region under the leadership of GIAVA, the FATF-styled regional committee representing West Africa, and we have successfully mentored the FIU of Liberia in being admitted into the FIU while we continue the mentorship of the FIUs of Gambia and Sierra Leone to achieve the same goal.
At a global level, we continue to lead Nigeria’s efforts to exit the financial action taskforce list of jurisdictions on under monitoring, while we still have so many steps to take, I’m confident that we appeal for support and we will continue all the required steps within the next few months. Indeed, the progress we have made as a country has opened the path for us to become the second African member state of the task force on the near future after South Africa.
We will focus our international cooperation by increasing cooperation with links to addictions which pose specific monetary and terrorist financing threats to our country, particularly countries where organized criminal groups ostensibly of Nigerian origin have damaged our country’s reputation.
Your Excellencies, ladies and gentlemen, I am a firm believer in cooperation and collaboration. I believe that if we work together in true partnership, our success is not only possible, it is guaranteed.
I would like to seize this opportunity to pledge to you the commitment of the NFIU to an open, transparent and productive working relationship with all our stakeholders. As the often-cited phrase from Margaret Mead goes, “never doubt that a small group of toughly committed citizens can change the world. It is the only thing that ever has”. I believe that together we are the change that we seek for our country.
Bakari, the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of the Nigerian Financial Intelligence Unit (NFIU), delivered this welcome address at the opening ceremony of the first High Level Retreat of the NFIU in Abuja on Monday, August 19, 2024.
