Mustapha Akanbi

Muhammad Mustapha Adebayo Akanbi is a lawyer and retired judge who headed the Nigerian Independent Corrupt Practices Commission between 2000 and 2005.

Muhammad Mustapha Adebayo Akanbi was born on 11 September 1932 at Accra, Ghana, to Muslim parents from Ilorin in Nigeria. After completing secondary school he worked as an Executive officer in the Ghana Civil Service. He was also active as a trade unionist. Moving to Nigeria, he worked in the School Broadcasting Department of the Ministry of Education.

Mustapha Akanbi obtained a scholarship to study law at the Institute of Administration, now Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria, followed by legal studies in the United Kingdom. He was called to the English Bar in 1963, and was called to the Nigerian Bar in January 1964. He joined the Ministry of Justice and became a Senior State Counsel in 1968. In 1969 he set up in private practice in Kano. In 1974 he was appointed a judge of the Federal Revenue Court, and in January 1977 he was elevated to the Court of Appeal Bench. In 1992 he was made President of the Nigerian Court of Appeal, a position he held until retiring in 1999. His son is also a successful Lawyer, becoming Chairman of the Nigerian Bar Association, Ilorin Branch.

In 2000 President Olusegun Obasanjo appointed Akanbi as Chairman of the newly established Independent Corrupt Practices Commission (ICPC). Four years later, the ICPC had failed to make any significant convictions. Akanbi publicly questioned why the government had set up the ICPC and appointed competent people to run it "only to frustrate it from performing by starving it of funds". He said that another issue was that the law forbade it from investigating corrupt practices dating before the creation of the ICPC. In March 2004, Justice Mustapha Akanbi urged parliamentarians to ratify the United Nations and the African Union Conventions Against Corruption, which would greatly assist the struggle against corruption.

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