…distributes assets declaration forms to newly elected politicians

BY CHRIS OCHAYI

ABUJA-Determined to mount effective surveillance around their conduct in offices, the Code of Conduct Bureau, CCB, yesterday disclosed that it had distributed assets declaration forms to all politicians newly elected into various public offices during the April 2011 general elections.

Federal Commissioner in charge of Information Communication Technology, ICT, of Code of Conduct Bureau, CCB, Dr. Ademola Adebo, who stated this yesterday at the five-day training workshop organised for staff and management of the Code of Conduct Bureau, in Nigeria, said forms had also been distributed to all re-elected public officers.

The training workshop, entitled “Income and asset declaration: A guide for practitioners and policy makers”, was organised by the World Bank in collaboration with United Nations office for Drugs and Crime, UNODC, the British Council, and United States Embassy.

According to Dr. Adebo, “they (newly elected officers) are all declaring their assets; they will all declare, I can assure you.

“The Code of Conduct Bureau, CCB, mapped out the country and divided it into six zones and the commissioners are moving to the various zones; do you know we have offices in all the state of the federation? 
“So, all these offices are headed by directors and most of them are here to benefit from this training workshop.  So all those newly elected public officers, and even all those who were there and got re-elected, they have to fill new forms. They know and are already collecting forms all over the place and there is a lot of demands for forms.

“We are going to monitor, we are going to verify and investigate all those forms.  You know, people believe that we just collect the forms and dump them. 

“No, we don’t. It is just because if you are not in breach, we won’t invite you.  But those who are in breach, we invite them and they know we are working.

“So, if you are a level three officer, you are level five officers and you completed a form and we collected it from you and verified it, there is no need to invite you. But we will do our own conference verification with our experts internally.

“So if you are not in breach and we believe that everything you have said, we have cross-checked and they are okay, of course, we can’t check one million forms.