Obi

The question

In October 2021 the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists published the Pandora Papers, a set of leaked records from offshore service providers. Reporting from that consortium, including by its Nigerian partner, described an offshore company incorporated in the British Virgin Islands in 2010, during Peter Obi's tenure as governor of Anambra State, and stated that it did not appear in the asset declarations he had filed.

Peter Obi responded publicly. He said that nothing he had done was illegal, gave his account of the company's purpose, and set out his understanding of what the declaration rules required of him. That response is itself part of the record this file will work from.

The question the file exists to answer is therefore narrow and factual: what do the declarations actually say. Not whether an offshore company is improper, which is a separate argument, and not whether the reporting was fair, which is not ours to adjudicate.

Why it is hard, and why that is the story

Section 140 of the Nigerian Constitution's Fifth Schedule provides that asset declarations filed by public officers shall be made available for inspection by any citizen of Nigeria, on terms and conditions that the National Assembly may prescribe.

The National Assembly has never prescribed them. The right exists in the text and has no mechanism attached to it, and so in practice the declarations of every public officer in the country, including those of every president since 1999, are inspectable by nobody.

That is the second half of this file, and possibly the larger half. A claim about an undeclared asset cannot be tested by a citizen, in either direction, by design or by neglect. It cannot be confirmed and it cannot be cleared.

What the file will rest on

1. The published output of the Pandora Papers consortium, as a documented account by identified journalists working from a named source set.
2. The offshore register of the jurisdiction of incorporation, queried directly, with the query printed.
3. The declaration regime itself: the constitutional provision, the enabling statute, the forms, and the record of every attempt to enact the prescribing legislation.
4. Peter Obi's own public responses, in full and in his words, wherever they bear on a proposition in the file.

What this file will not do

1. It will not assert that anything was concealed. That proposition requires the declaration, and the declaration is not available to us or to anyone else.
2. It will not treat the absence of an inspectable document as evidence about its contents. An unreadable record is unreadable in both directions.
3. It will not describe holding an offshore company as unlawful. It is not, in itself, and the file will say so in the same voice it uses for everything else.
4. It will not run as a counterweight to File 01. The files are not a scoreboard, and a finding in one has no bearing on a finding in another.

When it publishes

When the declarations are obtained through a lawful route that creates no attributable transaction, or when a request for them is refused in writing and the refusal itself becomes the document, or when the record of the missing legislation is complete enough to stand on its own.

If none of those conditions is met, the file will be published as what it is: an account of a question that a citizen has a constitutional right to answer and no lawful means of answering. That version would be shorter and, on the evidence so far, no less serious.