The Directorate of Public Officers’ Declarations of Assets, Liabilities and Business Interests has said it will continue undertaking a comprehensive process of physically verifying declarations made by President Peter Mutharika and the rest of his cabinet, having suspended the task due to funding constraints.
Assets Director, Christopher Tukula, disclosed in an interview on Thyrsday that his office will also continue with physical verification of declarations of other selected public officers after which a report will be presented to Parliament in June this year.
This will be the first time for the assets office to complete the physical verification process of any selected component since its establishment about three years ago.
Tukula expressed optimism that a comprehensive report of the verifications will be ready by June so that it can be tabled in Parliament by his office’s monitoring committee which is essentially the Public Appointments Committee (Pac).
“We expect to continue with the physical verification next month after we get funding from Treasury having suspended the process before due to funding cuts. Physical verification is one crucial element of the assets declaration regime and it has to be undertaken at all cost,” Tukula said.
He added that so far, for the cabinet members and other selected officers, his office has undertaken physical verification on assets like cars, through the Road Traffic Directorate, while other processes will be undertaken once the cash flow stabilises.
The Assets Act was developed to check unlawful accumulation of wealth by public officers and entrench transparency and accountability.
In 2014, the office first received the declarations of public officers who included Mutharika, his deputy Saulosi Chilima, other cabinet ministers and members of Parliament (MPs).
Towards the end of last year, the assets directorate also started receiving the annual updates of the declarations even though physical verification on the initial declarations had not yet been undertaken.
Recently, Executive Director of Justice Link, Justin Dzonzi, observed that the essence of having the assets office is being defeated by failure to physically verify the declarations by listed public officers.
Dzonzi argued that assets’ physical verification is the only way the public can have confidence that public officers are not accumulating wealth illicitly because the assets office will be able to determine whether what someone has declared is really what they possess.
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