Nigeria is notorious for corruption. Almost in equal measure, the country has several anti-corruption agencies established to control corruption. Over the two decades, several studies have been conducted on the comparative operational performance of these anti-corruption institutions particularly on the Independent Corrupt Practices and Other Related Offences Commission (ICPC) and Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC). However, what is usually not clarified or justified in these studies are the criteria upon which such comparative analyses are based. In our study conducted by ethnography, we reviewed the operational activities of the ICPC mainly by participant-observation, document analysis and interviews. We found that the ICPC contextualises Nigeria’s corruption as being ubiquitous, financial, and non-financial in nature, and that corruption thrives on opacity in public administration and governance. We argued that the institutional perspectives of each anti-corruption agencies are critical to any informed analysis that would produce seminal findings on the comparative performances of Nigeria’s anti-corruption agencies and that research practices on comparative studies of Nigeria’s anti-corruption agencies should change. We therefore recommend complementary studies on the EFCC’s institutional perspectives on Nigeria’s corruption.

Keywords: Anti-corruption, Corruption, comparative studies, ethnography