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Political Conference Committee
Recommends Quick Passage of FOI Bill
ABUJA, FRIDAY, MAY 20, 2005: The Committee on Anti-Corruption Reforms of
the National Political Reforms Conference (NPRC) has called for the urgent
passage into law of the Freedom of Information Bill presently before the
National Assembly.
The immediate passage of the Bill is one of the short term measures
proposed by the Committee to combat corruption in Nigeria. It said the
enactment of the Bill into law will enable civil society and the media to
have access to vital information.
The Committee on Anti-Corruption Reforms, headed by former Supreme Court
Justice Chukwudifu Oputa, is one of the 19 Committees set up by the
Conference. It was charged with suggesting ways and means of combating
the menace of corruption in Nigeria.
The Committee also recommended that the Whistle Blowers Bill, which is
also pending before the National Assembly, should be enacted into law to
formally protect whistle blowers, which it describes as informants who
expose corrupt practices.
The Committee observed that secrecy of declaration of assets by public
officers and the restriction of access to the declarations made by public
officers constitute a serious impediment to the critical functioning of
the Code of Conduct Bureau.
It said: “The Bureau is not given the resources to verify written
declarations made by public officers, and it is further hampered by the
fact that declarations are kept away from members of the public who are
best placed to alert the Bureau on false declarations or deliberate or
fraudulent omissions by public officers in declaring their assets.”
The Committee noted that enquiries made by members of the public in
respect of public officers’ declarations are largely frustrated by:
The Committee regretted that although Paragraph 3(c) of the Third Schedule
to the 1999 Constitution gives every citizen of Nigeria the right to
inspect the assets declaration of every public officer subject to such
terms and conditions prescribed by the National Assembly, for more than
five years the National Assembly has not prescribed any conditions.
It noted that although the Bureau on its own prescribed certain conditions
which the Committee adjudged to be too restrictive and prohibitive, even
those conditions have been struck down by the courts as being
unconstitutional on the ground that it is the National Assembly that ought
to have prescribed them.
The Committee said in a situation where the Bureau is seriously
handicapped in its verification activities due to lack of funds, members
of the public would have been the major source of information on
defaulting public officers.
According to the Committee, the report submitted to it by the Bureau
showed that it (the Bureau) has received only 357 petitions between 2000
and 2005, out of which only 23 (or 0.5 per cent) were sent to the Code of
Conduct Tribunal for prosecution.
It stressed that “The result is that failure to give the public easy
access to declaration results in few reports from the members of the
public and only 0.5 per cent of these reports are accurate owing to lack
of access by the members of the public.
The Committee noted that the Bureau was consequently wasting a lot out of
the little time and resources available to them to sift through a large
amount of inaccurate information.
It suggested that declaration of assets by all public officers should be
published both on assumption and after leaving office and that such
declarations should be verified and offenders prosecuted.
The Conference will reconvene in plenary sessions from May 23 when it will
begin consideration of the reports of the various committees.
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