Wealth declarations go digital: the accountability test behind Oginde’s proposal

EACC chairperson David Oginde has called for automated wealth declarations and secure links between public-service information systems, placing the handling of officials’ financial disclosures at the centre of a new discussion about corruption prevention.

According to The Star’s 1 October report, Oginde spoke at the opening of a two-day workshop for Public Service Commission leaders in Naivasha. The work concerns declarations of income, assets and liabilities, often abbreviated to DIALs.

The same report quotes PSC chairperson Francis Meja describing the difficulty of retrieving a single declaration from a large collection of paper forms. His account explains the administrative problem the proposed system seeks to address. It does not establish that a new national platform has already been launched or that all historic records have been digitised.

Collecting a declaration is only the first step

A declaration records information supplied by an official. Its value for oversight depends on what happens next: whether the information can be retrieved, checked where legally appropriate and connected to a decision that may involve a conflict of interest.

Moving a paper form onto a screen can improve administration, but it does not by itself establish that the contents are complete or correct. A useful system needs a way to distinguish information entered by the declarant from information subsequently verified, corrected or disputed.

That distinction matters when a record is used to raise a concern. An incomplete field, a change in ownership or a difference between reporting periods may require clarification. A digital flag should begin an appropriate review, not be presented to the public as proof that an offence has occurred.

The existing law is broader than a technology project

Kenya’s Conflict of Interest Act, 2025 addresses conflicts in decision-making, preferential treatment, misuse of official information, gifts, recruitment and other areas. Its provisions also include compliance measures such as recusal and registers of interests.

That scope is important. The policy problem is not simply whether a person owns an asset. It is whether a private interest intersects with a public responsibility in a way the law regulates, and whether the prescribed steps are taken when that happens.

A declaration system can support that process by making relevant information available to authorised officials. It cannot replace the need to establish the facts, apply the correct rule and document the response. A software purchase should therefore be assessed against the legal work it enables rather than treated as a complete anti-corruption programme.

Secure sharing requires clear limits

The proposal for integration raises a practical question: who should be able to see which information, and for what purpose? Public-service records can contain financial and family information whose disclosure is consequential. Giving every user access to everything would not be a sound interpretation of accountability.

The Office of the Data Protection Commissioner’s published discussion of public-sector digital transformation stresses lawful processing, risk assessment and privacy safeguards. That statement dates from 2024 and supplies background; it is not a new intervention in the Naivasha workshop.

For the proposed declarations system, practical safeguards would include defined access roles, records of who viewed or changed information, and a clear process for correcting errors. These are design questions for scrutiny, not claims about features already implemented by the PSC.

The public explanation should also distinguish secure sharing between authorised institutions from publication on an open website. They serve different purposes and create different risks. The announcement reviewed for this article does not establish that individual declarations will be made publicly searchable.

What the corruption claim does and does not establish

Oginde argued that addressing conflicts of interest would remove a large share of corruption cases. That is an argument for prioritising prevention. Political Headache has not verified a dataset that would justify treating a precise predicted reduction as an established result.

KBC’s report of the workshop likewise describes the intended benefits of automation and integration. Intended benefits remain targets until there is evidence of delivery. Faster retrieval may be measurable relatively quickly; a reduction in corrupt conduct requires a different kind of assessment.

A credible evaluation would separate administrative performance from enforcement outcomes. The number of declarations submitted, the time needed to retrieve a record and the number of errors corrected tell one part of the story. The handling of substantiated conflicts tells another. Neither should be replaced by a single publicity figure.

Questions to follow after the workshop

The next useful documents would identify the system’s scope, responsible institutions, implementation timetable and cost. They should explain which records are included, how older declarations will be handled and what support will be available to officers who must submit information.

Procurement and maintenance also deserve attention. A platform has to remain usable when staff change, suppliers change or an incident interrupts service. An initial launch is only one stage of a longer public obligation to keep records reliable and accessible to the right people.

Political Headache’s accountability desk follows the gap between institutional commitments and verifiable outcomes. In this case, the useful test is whether digitisation produces a better documented process for identifying and managing conflicts while protecting information entrusted to the state.

The Naivasha discussion offers a specific administrative reform to examine. Its success should be judged through evidence of how declarations are processed and used, with clear legal safeguards and published performance measures. That would make the reform more meaningful than simply replacing a paper filing cabinet with a digital one.