The Code of Conduct Bureau should sit up
With questions persistently raised about the utility of assets declaration in Nigeria and the role of the Code of Conduct Bureau (CCB), there is an urgent need to make for more transparency and accountability. The 1999 Constitution (as amended) stipulates that every public officer should declare his assets “immediately after taking office” and at every four years or at the end of term of office. The list of officers expected to declare their assets is long: the president, vice-president, senate president, deputy senate president, speaker, deputy speaker, House of Representatives, speakers of states house of assembly, governors, deputy governors, justices of the Supreme Court and Court of Appeals, commissioners, directors, chairmen and members of local councils, military officers, and lots more.
However, it is doubtful if many of these public officials so listed comply with the law and there is no way Nigerians can know given the disposition of the institution charged with enforcing compliance, which is the CCB. Yet, as provided in the 1999 Constitution, the bureau is mandated “to establish and maintain a high standard of morality in the conduct of government business and to ensure that the actions and behaviour of public officers conform to the highest standards of public morality and accountability”.
It is instructive that Section 3(c) of Third Schedule of the 1999 Constitution empowers the CCB to “retain custody of such declarations and make them available for inspection by any citizens of Nigeria on such terms and conditions as the National Assembly may prescribe.” On its part, the Freedom of Information Act 2011, an Act of the National Assembly, has prescribed the condition for information disclosure. In Section 1(1), the Act states: “Notwithstanding anything contained in any other Act, Law or Regulation, the right of any person to access or request information, whether or not contained in any written form, which is in the custody or possession of any public official, agency or institution howsoever described, is hereby established.”
The main problem is the way the CCB treats requests based on the FOI Act. Part of the functions of the bureau is to receive complaints of non-compliance, investigate the complaints and where appropriate refer such matters to the Code of Conduct Tribunal. But how can the bureau receive complaints if everything is done in secrecy and the declaration of assets is not open to public scrutiny? With the information locked away and indeed fiercely protected by the body that ordinarily should ensure accountability in the public arena, how useful is the whole exercise?
That perhaps explains why since the bureau came on stream in 1989, there is no record that any public officer has been successfully prosecuted and sanctioned. Ordinarily, the CCB should take the lead in making public officials account for what they own after office but that is not what happens. Indeed, when last did you hear anything about the bureau verifying the assets of any public officer mid-term or after leaving office? So how will the body enforce transparency in government business when it does not bother to examine the records of officers in or out of government?
The CCB was set up to ensure greater transparency in government among public officers. But it has merely become another bureaucracy on which tax money is being expended. It is important to stress that declaring assets publicly does not break any known law in our country. Since the assets being declared by public officials are not available for public scrutiny, there is no way to ascertain its veracity. That’s why many have called on the National Assembly to amend the CCB Act to demand that the assets filed by public officials in Nigeria be made public.
