My net worth by Waziri Adio, NEITI CEO

 

By Soni Daniel & Innocent Anaba

 Executive Secretary of the Nigeria Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative, NEITI, Mr. Waziri Adio, has declared to the Code of Conduct Bureau, CCB, all the assets – both cash and otherwise – he had acquired in his 23 years of working to press home his desire to transparently run the body. Waziri-Adio Waziri-Adio Adio in a statement in Abuja, yesterday, said that though it was not mandatory for him to turn in the status of his assets to the CCB, he opted to do same because it was, “a potentially powerful sunshine mechanism that could help, in very practical ways, limit the incidence of corruption, one of the major challenges of our country.” Adio runs the NEITI, a transparency and accountability agency of the Federal Government with the mandate to shine more light on how Nigeria’s revenues from her extractive industries are applied for public good. “As required by paragraph 11 of the 5th Schedule of the 1999 Constitution and Section 15 of the Code of Conduct Bureau and Tribunal Act, I have submitted Form CCB 1. “My declarant ID is FGAO: 000512. Form CCB 1 is the Assets Declaration Form for Public Officers, which all elected and appointed public officers are mandated to submit to the CCB on assumption of and departure from office. “The CCB is empowered to verify the claims made in this form. In the main, this is to ensure that public officers do not anticipatorily over-declare their assets and that they do not use public office to corruptly enrich themselves,” Adio said. He said: “Asset declaration is thus not designed to be another perfunctory, box-ticking exercise. It is primarily a transparency and accountability instrument. This is a potentially powerful sunshine mechanism that could help, in very practical ways, limit the incidence of corruption, one of the major challenges of our country.” Adio explained that while the potency of this tool is gravely diminished, he still believes that it should be adhered to by public office holders. “In my view, by the fact that asset declaration is made a secret affair and the public, on behalf of whom people are elected or appointed to hold public offices, is not given a viable role in the verification of the assets declared and is denied the fundamental right to know, this is another case of the ‘missing public,’ and it needs fixing. “Therefore, as we rightly seek new beginnings for our country, we need to reinsert and reassert the public in this transparency and accountability process by lifting the veil of secrecy from the declared assets of our public officers. This I believe: all public officers should be made to declare their assets publicly; otherwise the impact of the assets declaration exercise is successfully neutered,” he added.