Issues around assets declaration

After what seems like eons of unnecessary, clumsy and exasperating rigmarole, President Muhammadu Buhari and Vice President Yemi Osinbajo finally released highlights of their assets declaration forms to the public on Thursday. The highlights were contained in a statement by the Senior Special Assistant to the President on Media and Publicity, Mallam Garba Shehu, who has been at the centre of most of the back-and-forth on the assets declaration issue. Even when most of the responses to the release have been positive, the build-up to it and the content of the release have raised a number of issues worth reviewing. Worth examining also is how to strengthen assets declaration as an instrument for checking graft and enthroning transparency and accountability in our country.  

On May 30, Mallam Shehu, in his capacity then as the head of Buhari’s media team, said that the president and his deputy had on 28 May 2015 filed their assets declaration forms in accordance with Section 140 of the 1999 Constitution. He disclosed that the forms were personally acknowledged by the Chairman of the Code of Conduct Bureau (CCB), Mr. Sam Saba. He further gave the president’s declarant ID as: President 000001/2015. Then, he added the clincher: “by declaring their assets, President Buhari and Vice President Osinbajo may have not only fulfilled the requirements of the Nigerian Constitution, but also fulfilled the first of their many campaign promises. While seeking election into the highest office in the land, the President had promised Nigerians that he would publicly declare his assets as soon as he took over government.” (Emphasis mine, as we will return to this shortly.)

Possibly when reminded that merely submitting a form to the CCB did not amount to fulfilling the promise to publicly declare assets, Mallam Shehu on June 6 issued a clarification. While appreciating public concern on the issue but not forgetting to tag it “a little precipitate,” he stated: “as required by law, the declaration and submission of documents to the CCB have been made, but there still remains the aspect of verification which the Bureau will have to conduct to authenticate the submissions made to it. In the circumstances, it is only after this verification exercise, and not before, that the declaration can be said to have been made and validated; and only after this, will the details be released to the public. There is no question at all that the President and the Vice President are committed to public declaration of their assets within the 100 days that they pledged during the presidential campaign. (Emphasis mine again.)

On Thursday September 3, Mallam Shehu finally released highlights of the declared assets and promised full disclosure later: “as soon as the CCB is through with the process, the documents will be released to the Nigerian public and people can see for themselves.” This partial release came within the 100-day mark promised in the quote highlighted in the preceding paragraph. As a partial release is better than no-release and definitely preferable to continual waffling, this is a commendable move, which additionally succeeded in tactfully taking attention away from the needless controversy that had been created around the president’s alleged 100-day promises. It could pass for a masterstroke, a tactical communication coup, if you will. On the contrary however, the spirited interventions by party and presidential spokespersons shortly before the assets were made public did not pass the muster for me. They were clumsy and counterproductive, and that is putting it mildly.

As if it was not bad enough that Mallam Shehu had declared that the president had fulfilled his campaign promise by merely filing his assets form with the CCB and inserted CCB verification as a conditionality for public release, the Special Adviser to the President on Media and Publicity, Mr. Femi Adesina on August 14 upped the ante in an interview with Mr. Kayode Ogundamisi. He flatly declared that the president did not make any commitment to publicly declare his assets. He reportedly said: “you need to get his words right, go and check all that the president said during the campaign, in no place would you see it attributed to him as a person. But then there is a document by his party, the All Progressives Congress, saying he would declare publicly, so we need to set that right, it’s a declaration by his party. Now what does the law require? The law requires public officers to declare their assets; he has done that. But his party has a document that says he would do it publicly. There is a procedure for that, and the procedure is that you first declare, Code of Conduct Bureau would verify and after that, if you want to make it public, the onus lies on you to say release. The procedure has to be followed.”

The drama did not end there, as the other presidential spokesperson, Mallam Shehu, decided to further push the plausible deniability envelop. In a widely circulated opinion piece he did ahead of Buhari’s 100 days in office, Mallam Shehu disowned the source of the pledge that his colleague had attributed to APC. It is possible that his motive was to take the bottom out of commentaries and analyses that would measure the president against the things he allegedly pledged to do within 100 days. But it is curious that the same Mallam Shehu, who had consistently referenced the president’s pledge to publicly declare his assets during the campaign and within the first 100 days, wrote: “in the course of electioneering, the presidential campaign had so many centers of public communication which, for whatever reason were on the loose. There is a certain document tagged “One Hundred Things Buhari Will Do in 100 Days” and the other, “My Covenant With Nigerians.” Both pamphlets bore the authorized party logo but as the Director of Media and Communications in that campaign, I did not fund or authorize any of those. I can equally bet my last Kobo that Candidate Buhari did not see or authorise those publications.”  And as if to bring the comedy of errors to a farcical climax, the National Publicity Secretary of APC, Alhaji Lai Mohammed, told Channels Television on August 31 that the party could be held to only its constitution and its manifesto, and then added ex cathedra: “Buhari never promised to do ANYTHING in 100 days—that’s the honest truth.”

It is good that the release (which, mind you was before verification by CCB) has partially put to rest the issue of the public disclosure of the president’s assets. But the regrettable shilly-shallying on this issue needs to be strongly denounced for a number of reasons. For one, the untidy rigmarole has done some damage to the well-earned and carefully-sculpted reputation of the president as a man of his words, the Mai Gaskiya!  Two, it is disingenuous to start denying campaign materials or shifting responsibilities after elections, especially when such materials could have possibly helped in positively contrasting the president against his opponent and in tilting some undecided voters. If there is need for denial at all, doing that a few weeks or days to a supposed deadline is not clean enough. Three, consistency and coherence are critical to effective communication. You can’t acknowledge that the president made a pledge today, invent a condition precedent tomorrow, shift the blame to his party the day after, and later completely disinherit the source of that pledge. Four, the language of presidential communication should be ennobled by restraint. Five, it is pointless scapegoating ardent supporters of the president and labelling them as “being on the loose” and risk alienating them. And finally, this episode reinforces the need to streamline who speaks for the president as too many cooks spoil the broth.

Apart from the needless costs and the important lessons derivable from the handling of the public declaration of the president’s assets, other issues have been thrown up that are also worth paying attention to, even when some of these issues are raised by those standing on shaky moral platforms themselves or people yet to recover from the last election. One major issue is the need for full disclosure. Mallam Shehu has said the forms will be made public when CCB completes its process. This is good, though it is worth noting that public disclosure of assets at the moment is voluntary and there is no condition whatsoever attached to it in the constitution, just as there is no condition attached to its partial release. It would be recalled that the late President Umaru Yar’Adua, the first president to publicly declare his assets, did so on 28 June 2007, almost a full month after he had been sworn in, with no indication that CCB had done its verification. Related to this is the need to attach values to all the items and an overall value of worth as stipulated in the forms. It is not enough to list a house without listing its location and worth, as these pieces of information will help the CCB in its verification exercise and will empower the public to make valuable inputs.

It would also be recalled that Yar’Adua put his total assets at N856, 452, 892, that of his wife at N19m and his liabilities at N88, 793, 269.77. Also, the then Vice President Goodluck Jonathan declared his total assets at N295, 304, 420 on 9 August 2007, more than a month after his principal had declared his own and definitely against his will as he refused to declare his assets publicly when he later became president. In June 2012, he made it clear during a televised presidential chat that the earlier declaration was against his conviction: “the issue of public asset declaration is a matter of personal principle. That is the way I see it, and I don’t give a damn about it, even if you criticise me from heaven.” I have a feeling that while Buhari definitely gives a damn, it is this net worth that might be the problem of some of the people around him. My sense is that some of them might be bothered about possible arguments that Buhari is not as poor as previously projected and about how his example will put pressure on them to declare their own assets too. But I do not think the intention of asset declaration is to get us fixated on worth per se, but about whether our assets (both dormant and active) can be explained, about whether we are not enriching ourselves at public expense and about how those in public office should be answerable to the public.

This leads me to the most important point of it all. Asset declaration should be a transparency mechanism, an affirmation of the saying that sunshine is the best disinfectant. Its purpose is defeated if assets are declared and verified quietly, if declared assets and their values are not verified against actual assets and their real values, if CCB officials are allegedly colluding to alter submissions or accommodate future acquisitions, if exit assets declarations are unfilled or questions are not asked about change of fortunes and if everything is shrouded in secrecy without input from the public. Little wonder why this tool is of little effect. After declaring his assets against the advice of the CCB in 2007, President Yar’Adua promised to work with the National Assembly “to see what can be done to make assets declaration an effective weapon in the fight against corruption and abuse of office.” For now, assets declaration (secret and public) remains a perfunctory and hollow exercise. President Buhari can strengthen this important instrument not only through the force of personal example but also by encouraging others to do, and by advising the CCB to grant FOI requests on it and abandon its unhelpful attitude of institutional resistance.

This article first appeared in THISDAY