President Bola Tinubu has approved a massive increase in the Code of Conduct Bureau (CCB)’s budget from about N3 billion to nearly N20 billion.
The Chairman of the Code of Conduct Bureau (CCB) Dr Abubakar Bello, disclosed this in an interview with the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) on Sunday in Abuja.
Bello said the increase was to overhaul the nation’s outdated asset declaration system, strengthen verification and enforcement to make the bureau more virile.
He added that the budget increase was necessary to fund technological upgrades, improve the bureau’s working environment and strengthen verification processes and enhance enforcement capacity.
The CCB chairman recalled that when he assumed office, he discovered that asset declaration was still largely manual, relying on paper forms that were scarce, expensive to print and difficult to store, analyse and verify.
He noted that public servants across ministries and agencies constantly requested tens of thousands of forms that the bureau could not provide.
According to him, the situation was worsened by the fact that the 2025 budget provided only about N70 million for printing forms.
He said the amount could only produce just about 50,000 to 60,000 forms for over 4.5 million public servants nationwide.
To address the challenge, he said the bureau adopted a temporary model inspired by Kenya, uploading asset declaration forms on its website for public servants to download.
However, he said the method only solved the problem of availability, not the deeper issue of a manual system.
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