Of Asset Declarations, Baby Support And The Quiet Work Of Governance

In a country where we are accustomed to officials who show up for photo opportunities and disappear when it is time for actual work, it is worth pausing to acknowledge when someone in government is doing the right things. Not to engage in sycophancy, God knows we have enough of that in Nigeria, but because accountability must run in both directions. We must be quick to call out failure. We should also be willing to recognise effort.

Two recent developments from the Office of the Vice President deserve that recognition.

The first involves the Code of Conduct Bureau. Vice President Kashim Shettima last week received a delegation from the CCB led by its new Chairman, Dr. Abdullahi Usman Bello, at the Presidential Villa. What the Vice President told them is worth taking seriously, not just as a ceremonial charge from a senior official to a subordinate agency, but as a statement of what we actually need from an institution that has spent most of its existence as a punchline.

Shettima told the CCB to remain apolitical. He told them to maintain strict independence. He urged the Bureau to complete its digitisation process so that public officers can declare their assets electronically from anywhere in the country, without the theatre of throngs in government offices filling out paper forms. “There is no need for public officials thronging your offices trying to fill in some forms,” the Vice President said. “And you can take them to task, since it has been digitised. You expect everyone to play by the rules.”

Now I have heard these kinds of charges before. We all have. Senior officials marching into agencies with rousing speeches and leaving nothing behind but press releases. But the digitisation push deserves specific attention because it addresses a very concrete issue: the culture of deliberate delay and obscurity that has surrounded asset declaration in this country for decades.

When you make a declaration electronic, traceable and verifiable, you remove several layers of the fog behind which dishonest officials have always hidden.

The CCB has been one of the most underutilised anti-corruption instruments in our entire governance architecture. The Bureau has powers that, if properly exercised, could make corrupt public officers genuinely uncomfortable. It can prosecute. It can recover assets.

According to the CCB chairman himself, the Bureau has already recorded recoveries within Nigeria and abroad, including in London. That is nothing. The question is whether those recoveries are the beginning of a pattern or a one-off performance for the cameras. That is why the Vice President’s charge to the Bureau to be “as apolitical as humanly possible” matters more than it might appear.

The moment the CCB becomes a tool for going after political opponents while leaving political allies untouched, it loses all credibility and becomes just another Lagos agbero with a government logo. The Vice President knows this. His charge acknowledges it directly. The CCB chairman and his team must take that instruction at face value and be judged by it.

The second development, and arguably the more far-reaching of the two, is the presentation of the Renewed Hope Baby Support programme to the Vice President by the North East Development Commission’s management.

The RHBS is a programme designed to ensure that every Nigerian child — starting with those in the North East enters life through a structured pathway that connects identity, healthcare participation and long-term opportunity. The numbers behind the problem it is trying to solve are stark. Nigeria records approximately 7.6 million births every year. Fewer than half of those children are formally registered in their first year of life. That means millions of Nigerian children begin their lives as invisible people outside the national identity system, outside the health planning framework, outside every structure that could theoretically support their development.

Think about what that actually means. A child born in Maiduguri, Potiskum or Gombe who is not registered has no birth certificate. Without a birth certificate, that child cannot access formal education without hurdles, cannot qualify for targeted health interventions, and cannot eventually access the financial system as an adult citizen with a documented history. The chain of disadvantage that starts with a missing name in a register is extraordinarily long, and our political class has largely treated it as an afterthought for 25 years.

The RHBS programme, at its core, is trying to break that chain. It uses what its architects call milestone-linked support, connecting children from birth to formal systems in a structured, trackable way. It is not a traditional welfare handout. The Senior Special Assistant to the President on Regional Development, Dr. Mariam Masha, was specific about this distinction: the RHBS is a national human capital infrastructure initiative, not a social intervention in the conventional sense.

The necessary infrastructure and political mandate already exist, she noted. What is now required is disciplined execution.

The phrase “disciplined execution” is the most important in this entire conversation. Nigeria has never lacked good policy documents or ambitious programme frameworks. We have reports gathering dust on ministry shelves that, if implemented properly, would have changed millions of lives. Our problem has almost never been the idea.

It has been the distance between the idea and the result. The NEDC, to its credit, appears to understand this. The programme is positioned with a clear rollout strategy, including a presentation of its implementation plan scheduled for Children’s Day, 27 May 2026.

The Vice President’s enthusiasm for both initiatives reflects a noteworthy direction in this administration’s engagement with the North East specifically. Shettima is from Borno State. He knows personally what the insurgency costs that region, not just in infrastructure but in human capital. The children who grew up during the peak years of Boko Haram’s campaign are now young adults who lost years of schooling, stability and opportunity. The RHBS is, among other things, an attempt to ensure the next generation of children in that region does not begin life in the same deficit.

Mind you, good intentions and well-designed frameworks only take you so far. The proof of both the CCB reforms and the RHBS programme will not be in the press statements. It will be whether corrupt officials are actually prosecuted, regardless of their political colour, and whether a child born in Borno State in 2026 can obtain a birth certificate before her first birthday. Those are the real benchmarks.

What makes these two developments worth highlighting in the same column is the thread that runs through both. One is about demanding accountability from officials at the top of the system. The other is about extending the state’s reach to its citizens at the very bottom. A functional government has to do both at the same time. You cannot talk about social protection programmes for vulnerable children while the officials in charge of those programmes are looting the resources meant to fund them. And you cannot lecture about asset declaration while ignoring the structural exclusion of millions of Nigerian children from the systems that asset declaration is supposed to protect.