The Chairman of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC), Ola Olukoyede, has stated that many public officers are now perfecting the art of anticipatory declaration of assets to justify their intended theft of public funds and other acts of corruption.
Naija News reports that Olukoyde made this known on Tuesday, August 12, 2025, while delivering a goodwill message at the launch of the Virtual Tool on the Code of Conduct for Public Officers, organised by the Code of Conduct Bureau (CCB) in collaboration with the Technical Unit on Good Governance and Anti-corruption Reforms (TUGAR).
In a statement by the Head, Media & Publicity of the EFCC, Dele Oyewale, the anti-graft agency’s boss, stated that the commission carried out an investigation and discovered how some public officers engage in various criminal activities.
He urged the leadership of CCB to take note of such criminality and intensify investigations through innovative means to curb corruption.
He said, “There is an investigation we carried out and we discovered something not too strange that proves how criminally smart some of our politically exposed persons carry out some of the various activities we investigate them for. I asked my boys to get the CCB form because there is something we were not clear about and we discovered one of the very big properties valued at over N3billion that the person declared in the CCB form carried an address different from the address of the location of the property. I felt something was awry here, we decided to dig further and after more interrogation, we discovered that the person declared the property when the property was not in existence.”
Also speaking at the event, the Attorney General of the Federation and Minister of Justice, Prince Lateef Fagbemi, emphasised that the bedrock of public service is adherence to the standards and ethics of service.
He applauded the virtual tool designed by the CCB as a significant milestone in the digitisation and technological investigation of public conduct, stating that it will promote preventive compliance and awareness.
Fagbemi also urged public servants to adopt the new tool and improve conduct in public service.
On his part, the Chairman of the Code of Conduct Bureau, Abdullahi Usman Bello, explained that the tool will make public officers accountable and easy to use.
He said, “The tool will ensure that public servants carry out their duties in high esteem and educate them on the step to step rules and regulations that guides them.”
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