May 29: Make Your Asset Declaration Public — SERAP To Tinubu

The President-elect, Bola Tinubu, has been urged by the Socio-Economic Rights and Accountability Project (SERAP) to publicly declare his assets ahead of the inauguration on May 29.

Speaking in an open letter dated May 27, 2023, and signed by SERAP’s Deputy Director, Kolawole Oluwadare, the group called on Tinubu to start on a clean slate by doing the needful.

SERAP also told the former Lagos governor to impress it on the Vice President-elect, Kashim Shettima, to the same.

“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.

“As Nigerians have witnessed for eight years, Buhari has neither ‘killed corruption’ nor obeyed court judgments on transparency and accountability.

“Widely publishing details of your assets, income, investments and liabilities and encouraging your Vice President-elect and others to do the same would allow Nigerians to know your worth and the worth of other public officials.

“If your election is upheld by the judiciary, your government can use transparency in asset declarations as a means of promoting public accountability and ending systemic corruption in the country.

 “Buhari’s broken promises to make specific details of his assets public and to ‘kill corruption’ have opened up the country’s political and electoral processes to a money free-for-all, discouraged political participation and contributed to impunity for corruption.

“Although President Buhari’s march to Aso Rock was predicated, in large part, on his campaign rhetoric to ‘kill corruption’, corruption remains widespread among high-ranking public officials and in ministries, departments and agencies (MDAs).

“Making public details of your assets, liabilities, and interests would reduce unjust enrichment of public officials, ensure integrity in public offices, and promote transparency and accountability as well as good governance.

“Nigeria is very rich but its wealth is gravitating rapidly into the hands of a small portion of the population, and the power of corrupt enrichment has continued to threaten to undermine the political integrity of the country.

“The tendency for politicians when trying to persuade Nigerians to vote for them is to conceal or hide traits that might make voters reluctant to vote them into power and to hide what they want to do with that power. But once voted into power, politicians become trustees of public wealth and resources and must remove the camouflage.

“Effective enforcement and implementation of court judgments are critical to the national interest and to the restoration of the rule of law in the country.

“The incoming government, therefore, has a responsibility to improve citizens’ trust and confidence in government. But it will be difficult for the new government to be trusted if its leaders do not come clean about their assets and incomes", part of the statement reads.