Disgraced Pension Boss Abdulrasheed Maina Honored with NBA Award

The landscape of Nigeria’s anti-corruption war shifted into a surreal dimension on Thursday as Abdulrasheed Maina, the convicted former chairman of the Presidential Task Force on Pension Reforms, made a high-profile public appearance. Maina, who was jailed for the brazen theft of over ₦2 billion from the nation’s pension funds, was not just a guest at a legal gathering in Abuja; he was the guest of honor. In a move that has sent shockwaves through the legal community, the Garki Branch of the Nigerian Bar Association (NBA) presented him with the “Rule of Law and Courage Award.”

Adorned in a muffler that boldly identified him as a “Patron” of the NBA Garki Branch, Maina used the platform at Asokoro to reinvent his narrative. Standing before an audience of legal practitioners, the man sentenced to eight years in 2021 for money laundering and treating pensioners with “disdain and levity” portrayed himself as a victim of a political witch-hunt. He alleged that his prosecution was a staged drama orchestrated by powerful figures within the previous administration to silence his efforts in recovering stolen assets.

The irony of the event was compounded by Maina’s vocal demand for the prosecution of former Attorney General of the Federation, Abubakar Malami. Maina claimed that the current money laundering charges facing Malami, his wife, and his son—involving approximately ₦8.7 billion—barely scratch the surface of a much larger financial scandal. Alleging that Malami had not been “properly investigated,” Maina positioned himself as a whistleblowing specialist in fund recovery, asserting that billions more could be reclaimed if the government followed his lead.

This public resurgence follows Maina’s quiet release from the Kuje Correctional Centre in February 2025. While his eight-year sentence was handed down in late 2021, the term was backdated to his initial 2019 arraignment, allowing him to walk free after serving less than four years of his actual sentence due to prison calendar calculations. His reappearance as a “patron” of a legal body has drawn immediate and fierce condemnation from the national leadership of the NBA.

In a scathing response issued on Friday, NBA President Mazi Afam Osigwe, SAN, dissociated the national body from the Garki Branch’s actions. The NBA described the honor as a “reprehensible mockery” of the legal profession and the global fight against corruption. The national leadership has since launched a disciplinary probe into the Garki Branch Chairman, Anthony Bamidele Ojo, vowing that the Bar will not be used as a “laundry service” for the reputations of convicted individuals.

Maina’s claims at the event were as bold as the award itself. He revisited the saga of his 2020 disappearance, alleging that he did not “jump bail” but was instead flown out of the country on a government aircraft for medical treatment. This version of events stands in stark contrast to the official record, which detailed a dramatic manhunt that ended with his arrest in the Niger Republic after he fled Nigeria to evade trial.

The background of Maina’s conviction remains one of the most “sordid and morbid” chapters in Nigerian judicial history, according to the original trial judge, Justice Okon Abang. The court found that Maina operated a sophisticated network of fictitious bank accounts and proxy companies to siphon funds meant for the elderly and vulnerable. His own siblings famously testified against him, revealing how their identities were used to facilitate the multibillion-naira fraud.

As the NBA national body moves to strip the Garki Branch of its controversial patron and sanction those involved, the incident serves as a polarizing reminder of the complexities of Nigeria’s justice system. While Maina attempts to pivot from a “pension thief” to a “rule of law advocate,” the shadow of the 23 forfeited properties and the thousands of pensioners who died without their benefits continues to loom large over his public rehabilitation efforts.