The Socio-Economic Rights and Accountability Project (SERAP), a leading not-for-profit organisation focusing on anti-corruption, on Sunday, charged the president-elect, Bola Tinubu, to make his assets and investments public.
The group, in a statement, also urged Mr Tinubu to encourage his deputy, Kashim Shettima, to take similar steps.
Mr Tinubu, who will be inaugurated as Nigeria’s next president on Monday, is expected to declare his assets and investments to the Code of Conduct Bureau (CCB) upon assumption of office.
The Nigerian constitution mandates public officers, including the president, vice-president, governors and their deputies, to declare their assets and liabilities to the CCB at the beginning and the end of their tenures.
But the law does not mandate the public officers to make such declarations available to the public.
But failure to declare assets fully or at the appropriate time amounts to a breach that the offender can be prosecuted for at the Code of Conduct Tribunal (CCT).
The outgoing president, Muhammadu Buhari, and his deputy, Yemi Osinbajo, partially disclosed their assets to the Nigerian public in a feeble attempt to fulfil a campaign promise shortly when they assumed office in 2015.
They promised to fully disclose their assets after an anticipated verification by the CCB, but they would later backtrack on the promise.
More transparently, the late President Umar Yar’adua consistently declared his assets publicly.
SERAP, in a statement on Sunday, recalled Mr Tinubu’s recent resolve to kill corruption.
The group urged the former Lagos State governor to begin the endeavour by publicly declaring his assets and investments.
“SERAP notes your recent promise to ‘kill corruption’. However, this rhetoric is nothing new: the outgoing President Muhammadu Buhari used a similar hollow anticorruption phrase in 2015,” the statement read in part. “As Nigerians have witnessed for eight years, Buhari has neither ‘killed corruption’ nor obeyed court judgments on transparency and accountability.”
The group also urged him to emulate the late President Yar’Adua, “who consistently published his asset declaration forms as president and governor of Katsina State.”
