Why We Give Operatives Military Training – EFCC

The Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) has explained the reasons for training its newly recruited cadets at the Nigerian Defence Academy(NDA) Kaduna, saying it is to ensure operatives are physically fit, bold and courageous. .

Secretary to the Commission, Ola Olukoyede stated this in an interview published in the February edition of Zero Tolerance, a publication of the EFCC.

According to Olukoyede, the EFCC is a law enforcement agency and operatives must be physically prepared since they are eligible to carry arms. 

He said although their cadets are trained at the NDA, they are also re-trained by the EFCC and given  orientation to be civil and friendly in their approach.

“The EFCC is hugely different from other law enforcement agencies because we fight a particular specie of crime. The NDA where we train them is a military facility, and we are not training them to be military men; we are training them to be investigators of white-collar crime, which will need more of mental alertness and this is exactly what we do with them anytime we bring them to our facility after they have been trained at the NDA,” he said.

“If they leave NDA and come straight to work, they will be coming with military mentality. They are not coming to EFCC to kill people or fight war or to fight battle as it were, they are coming to investigate crime, and when you are doing that you have to be more civil in your approach, so that’s exactly what we tell them.”