'Start with a clean slate, declare your assets and investments' - SERAP tells Tinubu

Socio-Economic Rights and Accountability Project (SERAP) has urged the President-Elect Senator Bola Ahmed Tinubu to “start with a clean slate by promptly making public details of your assets, income, investments, liabilities, and interests and to encourage your Vice-President-Elect to do the same.”

In the open letter dated Saturday, May 27, 2023 and signed by SERAP deputy director Kolawole Oluwadare, the organization said: “SERAP notes your recent promise to “kill corruption".

However, this rhetoric is nothing new: the outgoing President Muhammadu Buhari used similar hollow anticorruption phrase in 2015.”

SERAP urged Tinubu to “immediately prioritise the full and effective respect for human rights, media freedom, the rule of law and the country’s judiciary including by promptly obeying countless court judgments which the government of President Muhammadu Buhari has repeatedly treated with utter contempt and disdain.”

Read the full statement below:

“As Nigerians have witnessed for eight years, Buhari has neither ‘killed corruption’ nor obeyed court judgments on transparency and accountability.”

“Widely publishing details of your assets, income, investments and liabilities and encouraging your Vice-President-Elect and others to do the same would allow Nigerians to know your worth and the worth of other public officials.”

“If your election is upheld by the judiciary, your government can use transparency in asset declarations as a means of promoting public accountability and ending systemic corruption in the country.”

“Buhari’s broken promises to make specific details of his assets public and to ‘kill corruption’ have opened up the country’s political and electoral processes to a money free-for-all, discouraged political participation and contributed to impunity for corruption.”

“Although President Buhari’s march to Aso Rock was predicated, in large part, on his campaign rhetoric to ‘kill corruption’, corruption remains widespread among high-ranking public officials and in ministries, departments and agencies [MDAs].”

“Making public details of your assets, liabilities, and interests would reduce unjust enrichment...