At Code of Conduct Bureau, this is what you find...

The ongoing trial of the Senate President, Dr. Bukola Saraki,  for alleged inconsistency in asset declaration  may have increased the interest in the activities of the Code of Conduct Bureau.

And those who want to know more about its mandates, history and other e-library resources are fortunate that the bureau has home on digital space.

For a country where many ministries, departments and agencies still treat digital communication with levity, hosting a domain is a plus to the bureau.    

But, unfortunately, the portal is, at best, a collection of contradictory materials. There are also gaps in most virtually every folder, giving room for questions on the management of the cyberspace.

Like every law enforcement institution, the bureau relies on the public for support to discharge its responsibilities. On the portal, it notes that it cannot achieve much success if members of the public are not supportive in terms information whistle blowing.

Little wonder, it is one of the few agencies in Nigeria that provide for external petitions and whistle blower sections on their portal. While the whistle blower window on the Code f Conduct’s domain sounds great, making it accessible to those who want to use it is a challenge the bureau has yet to overcome.

On Thursday, our correspondent attempted to access the “whistle blower form”, which is listed on its “information centre” folder. But access to the supposed means of supplying privileged information was denied.

Thursday was the fourth or fifth failed attempt to view the page. The server, in all attempted cases, responded, “You may not be able to visit this page because of: an out-of-date bookmark/favourite, a search engine that has been out-of-date for this site, mistyped address; you have no access to this page, the requested resource was not found or an error has occurred while processing your request.”    

         

Still, inability to use important pages such as the whistle blower is just one of the many irritations visitors encounter on codeofconductbureau.gov.ng. This is apart from the fact that making sense of dozens of documents on prosecutions cases the organisation has handled in recent years is a Herculean task.  

On “legal matters”, one of the major folders listed on the green-and-white site, it lists five cases it has concluded – that is all it has for its 25 years of operation.  The “concluded” cases are the Federal Government versus Musa Mubeen, Federal Government versus Dauda Ashigye, Federal Government versus Yakubu Musa, Federal Government versus Willie Siyanbola and Federal Government versus Nathaniel Odediram.  

The notice said the cases were concluded but that ruling on them was adjourned to different dates – from February 6 to 27, 2013.  

Close to three years after that notice was issued, there has not been any other further communication on either the adjournment or ruling. This leaves visitors in the  dark as to what has become of the matters.  

There are similar inconsistencies from one section to another. For instance, there is no clarity on the 

status of “the cases at the tribunal.”  

Whereas most of the cases were reportedly adjourned, there is no further communication, in terms of when they were heard and the outcome.

These leave the website cluttered with documents that are neither good for news consumption nor useful for e-library filing.       

The site thus generally looks poorly-updated. The most recent documents found on it were filed in 2013. This makes it difficult for users to know via surfing what it has been doing in the past two years.

Its most celebrated case in recent years is Saraki’s trial. As of Thursday, the matter has not been added to the number of cases pending at the tribunal.