Assets declared by public officials must be made known to the public, Senior Presidential Advisor Yaw Osafo-Maafo has said.

In his view, the current opacity surrounding assets declared by public officials is not helpful.

“In Ghana, when you become a minister of state or a public sector worker at certain levels, the first thing you do is declare your assets and file them with the auditor general. What I personally don’t like about this law is that after you declare your assets, everything is kept confidential between the auditor general and yourself, and, therefore, it becomes difficult for anybody to challenge the authenticity of the declaration," the former finance minister said.

“I think that we should declare the assets, but there should be a certain level of transparency in the declaration of the assets so that people can assess what is declared by certain procedures," he said during an address at a stakeholder engagement of the Open Government Partnership (OGP) at the Mövenpick Ambassador Hotel in Accra.

“I happened to be consulting for somebody when we were drawing up the constitution of the republic, and I was championing the publication of the assets declared, and the chiefs were so furious with me and said they would be killed when people knew what they had,” he added.