PAGE 48 — SUNDAY
Vanguard, SEPTEMBER 6, 2015
BY SONI DANIEL, Northern Region Editor
I
brahim James Pam, a Nigerian, educated by the British government under its Chevening Scholarship Programme at the London School of Economics, and currently works as the Resident Investigator for the United Nations in South Sudan, is an expert in the criminal justice system. He had previously worked as Chief Legal Officer with the Nigerian Independent Corrupt Practices Commission, Chief Investigator with the African Development Bank and the International Criminal Court at The Hague, helping to develop instruments for checking financial crimes in many parts of the world. Just as he won the Chevening Scholarship in 2004, his daughter was among the 45 Nigerians who were admitted to the prestigious programme by the British High Commission in 2015 in Abuja and he was there to showcase himself as the head of the first Nigerian family where father and daughter have won the covetous award to study in London. He spoke on how he won the award, what it has done to his life and career and what it means to be a British scholar. Pam also reflected on the ICPC where he served as Legal Officer and how Nigeria can win the war against corruption. Excerpts: Not many Nigerians seem to know you. If I may ask, who is Ibrahim Pam? I am a Nigerian from a family in Jos, Plateau State. My father was Berom while my mother was the part of Kano that is now in Jigawa State. Her father was a Ghanaian whose father had settled in Kano and was trading for many years. My father was a lieutenantcolonel in the Nigerian Army. He was the first Nigerian officer who trained as an artillery officer and was commissioned in the Royal Military Academy in 1955. My mother was a federal electoral commissioner from 1978 to 1983 and had done other public service before that. I am the last of six children; I am a lawyer who graduated from the University of Jos in 1988 and I was called to the Bar in 1989. I worked first as a lawyer in Lagos in my early practice before joining the Continental Merchant Bank. I worked for a few years in the bank before going back into private practice. I joined the Oputa Panel in 2000 and worked on the public hearings and so on. In July 2001, I got an appointment as Chief Legal Officer in ICPC and I worked closely with Justice Akanbi. In that position I represented Nigeria in the negotiation of the African Union Convention against Corruption and the UN Convention against Corruption which we negotiated in Vienna and was concluded in 2003. I applied for the British Chevening Scholarship in 2004 and was fortunate to get it and proceeded for my Master's Programme at the London School of Economics where I bagged an MSc in Criminal Justice Policy. On my return, I was fortunate to have the option of choosing
PAM, UN INVESTIGATOR:
How Nigeria can win anti - corruption war! between five different jobs that I got while I was away; so I chose to go to the International Criminal Court as an Associate Analyst and later on as an investigator and this was the time in 2005 they had opened investigation into the Darfur crisis. I was assigned to that case and, over the course of seven years, I worked with the ICC on the Darfur case and the Libyan case. In Darfur we brought charges against nine individuals in five different cases and it was a very challenging time. I left the International Criminal Court in April 2012 to take a position at the African Development Bank as the Chief Investigator looking at financial crimes, misconduct and corruption. There we developed a sanctions regime and implemented a sanction process in collaboration with other multilateral development banks- the World Bank, Asian Development Bank, Inter-American Bank, European Investment Bank and the Islamic Development Bank. So I worked for three years at the African Development Bank and I left recently in April 2015 and I joined the United Nations in
June as the Resident Investigator in the UN Mission in South Sudan.
In that position I represented Nigeria in the negotiation of the African Union Convention against Corruption and the UN Convention against Corruption
So can we say you have hit the ultimate job? Not, my ultimate aim is to come home actually and contribute my quota to my country after 11 years outside. I love my country. You mean it? Actually, Nigeria is one of the most exciting countries in the world at the moment. I recently read two reports which gave me a lot of confidence about the prospects in Nigeria. One of the reports published in 2013 estimates that our economic potential will be so favourable that, by 2030, our consuming population alone will equal that of France and Germany put together. We are talking of tremendous market with tremendous potentials and the latest result by PwC estimates that, by 2050, Nigeria will be 9th largest economy in the world. So, we are looking at a tremendous progress between now and the next 35 years. So, I really look forward to coming home.
You mentioned something that is of interest to me. You said you had to choose between five jobs. I am interested in knowing where those jobs were coming from? I had the option to come to my old job at the ICPC. The second option was that I was offered a position at European Union Delegation in Nigeria to run. They had an office or department that was anticorruption related; I can’t really remember the title. The third one was that I was invited also by the EU to help set up a fund to support the EFCC and that fund was about 23 million Euros. The fourth was an offer from the United Nations to join the UN in Sudan which was just, at the time, for me I was to be the deputy to Susan Page who later on became the U.S Ambassador to South Sudan early this year. The problem with that was that I could not move with my family to Juba at the time because of the situation then. So I took up a position at the International Criminal Court
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