The Chairman of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC), Ola Olukoyede, has expressed great optimism towards Nigeria in becoming a country free of contract and procurement fraud, as the commission will resort to the use of e-procurement to track project execution.

The chairman revealed this in a meeting with officials of Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) made up of Christopher Wray (FBI’s Director), Charles Smith Jnr, Sydney Schauer, Joshua James Moldt, William Michael Miller, Vanessa M. Tibbits, William B. Stevens, Leigha Ramson, Sofie Admire Sosenzweig and Dr. Jim Oscar, on Friday, at the EFCC headquarters, Abuja.

Olukoyede said contract and procurement fraud would soon be a thing of the past as “we are going to ensure e-procurement in the entire nation so that it would be easy for us to track the execution of projects.

“That is one of the key innovations we have brought into our activities and we are really going to follow it through.”

He explained that: “One of our major problems in Nigeria is public corruption. Upon my assumption of office I shared my three major policy directives with the entire nation. I promised to use the instrumentality of the anti-corruption fight to stimulate the economy, in other words to ensure that businesses that are registered in Nigeria play by the rules.

“And we have shown in some of our activities that we were looking into a lot of government agencies as to how they carry out their activities particularly in the area of contract and procurement.”

The EFCC Chairman said he’ll use the activities of the EFCC to improve the international image of Nigeria, adding that that is why the commission is “vigorously pursuing the issue of cyber criminals because some of the activities of these folks have dented Nigeria’s image in the global space,” he said.

He also said: “Some of the crimes we fight are borderless crimes, so it is extremely important for law enforcement agencies across the world to come together to collaborate. Law enforcement agencies must collaborate more. Our activities must be borderless so that we will be able to challenge the activities of the bad guys”, he said.

He assured the FBI officials that his team will work in collaboration with the American agency to develop ideas that would be of mutual benefit to both agencies and ensure that the issue of cybercrime will take utmost priority in our scale of preference.

He also said he’ll ensure that sextortion that has become a major challenge to Nigeria is taken very seriously.