According to Punch, the
President-elect, Muhammadu Buhari, says those seeking political appointments in
his administration will be forced to declare their assets before taking office
and before leaving. Buhari said this during an interview with Sahara TV on
Sunday. He said this would encourage accountability and reduce corruption. He
said, “All those that were governors, ministers, permanent secretaries, head of
foreign staff and all those with political appointments will have to declare
their assets on the assumption of their appointment and definitely with the
courts. And once they leave they have to re-declare their assets.” Buhari, who
insisted that last-minute defectors would not be given appointments in his
government, promised not to interfere with the judiciary in the fight against
corruption but would strengthen the nation’s justice system. He stated that his
administration would not “become embroiled in investigation of every ministry,
and then the government will not have time to move forward.” The
President-elect slammed the Minister of Finance, Dr. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, for
the depletion of the Excess Crude Account. Okonjo-Iweala had said a significant
portion of the billions of dollars drained from ECA over the past two years was
distributed to governors instead of being saved for a rainy day However, Buhari
said the finance minister’s excuse was not acceptable. On the contentious issue
of oil block ownership and an equitable distribution of the country’s wealth,
he suggested that partisan politics in Nigeria was the cause of the uneven
distribution in the oil sector. Buhari said that he wanted to formalise the oil
sector in the country. He said that the “proliferation of oil fields to people
who don’t even know what it is, is one of the messes partisan politics has
brought.”
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