President Tinubu Increases CCB Allocation to N20 Billion
By Hajara Abdullahi
President Bola Ahmed Tinubu has approved an increase in the budget of the Code of Conduct Bureau (CCB) from about N3 billion to N17 billion.
This was disclosed by the Chairman of the Bureau, Abubakar Bello, during an interview with the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) on Sunday in Abuja.
Bello said the increment was aimed at modernizing the nation’s outdated asset declaration system, strengthening verification and enforcement, and making the Bureau more effective.
He added that the increase was necessary to fund technological improvements, upgrade the Bureau’s working environment, and enhance enforcement capacity.
Bello also lamented that public servants across ministries, departments, and agencies constantly requested tens of thousands of forms that the Bureau could not provide, noting that the 2025 budget worsened the situation as only about N70 million was allocated for printing forms—an amount sufficient to produce only about 50,000 to 60,000 copies for over 4.5 million public servants nationwide.
The CCB Chairman recalled that upon assuming office, he discovered that asset declaration was still done manually, relying heavily on paper forms that were scarce and expensive to print, store, verify, and analyze.
He explained that the Bureau addressed the challenge by adopting a temporary model borrowed from Kenya—uploading asset declaration forms on its website for public servants to download. However, he noted that the measure was only a stopgap, as it did not eliminate the inefficiencies of the manual system.
Bello further revealed that the Bureau is now developing a fully online asset declaration platform following several meetings with stakeholders, adding that it is expected to be operational by the first quarter of 2026.
Describing the platform as a “game changer,” he said it would be integrated with the Corporate Affairs Commission (CAC), Federal Inland Revenue Service (FIRS), Bank Verification Number (BVN) system, land registries, and other government databases to enable instant verification.
