Nigeria Code of Conduct Bureau stated recently that all the governors have declared their assets. The shocker from Code of Conduct Bureau is that none of the governors declared less than 100 million Naira in asset. This is an issue that must be checked out thoroughly to verify the authenticity of the governor’s assertions. It is unfortunate that none of the governors deemed it feat or courageous enough to publicly declare their asset so Nigerians will know what they have. I can understand that some politicians may fear that some of their assets will be vandalized if the public get the opportunity to know the locations of those assets especially real properties. If that is the case, they can give the public a range of their net worth as commonly done in other countries.
How is it possible that all the governors are worth at least 100 million Naira? It does not seem possible that some of these governors are worth such amount. Some of them are public servants who never earned anything close to such amount. Where did there get the money. Are some of these governors not declaring what they intend to steal or embezzle from the public treasury by the end of their term. When you look around the country, most of these governors are in a mad dash to borrow billions from Nigerian banks and international banking institutions. The legislative and the executive branch at the federal level, and the state Houses of Assemblies at the state level must take a critical look at these loans before approving them. Some of the stolen fund will be taken from these loans to cover the inflated asset declared before the Code of Conduct Bureau who may not have adequate man power to verify these assets within a short period of time and avoid comingling of the public and private fund which may yet occur.
Nigeria is awash with corruption to the point that President Buhari said that he is having problem finding non-corrupt Nigerians to serve as ministers under his administration. He may have to take look at Nigerians in diaspora. Corruption is so bad in Nigeria now that it has permeated every segment of the private and public sector. These governors are out there saying that that they need the money because their predecessor did not just leave empty treasury behind, but left them with billions of Naira in debt.
Code of Conduct Bureau need to hire more staff and physically verify all declared assets within six months so the public will know if assets declared by the governors are accurate and legitimate. If these assets are not verified quickly, one cannot tell if the money came from the public treasury. Asset declared by some governor seems very fishy. Some of these guys cannot possibly be that rich prior to winning the governor office. President Buhari said that corruption will kill Nigeria if Nigeria does not kill corruption. Mr. President needs to intervene and nip this potential fraud from the bud before it metastasizes by giving the Code of Conduct Bureau all the resources they need to quickly verify the assets declared by the governors. Same should be done for his future ministers.