What are you hiding?

The government’s refusal to make property details of ministers public is problematic.

On April 21, Prime Minister KP Sharma Oli formed a 15-member high-level good governance commission under his own leadership, with the likes of the finance minister, home minister and law minister as its members. Curiously, the prime minister chose to have a separate body directly under him instead of, say, adding teeth to the Commission for the Investigation of Abuse of Authority (CIAA), the constitutional anti-graft body and other related state organs. There is another reason to doubt Oli’s motives. Nearly 10 months since the formation of his government, he has yet to make public his own property details, or those of other members of his Cabinet. (This includes those the inductees into the high-level good governance commission.) Besides its two most recent entrants, all other members of his Cabinet long ago submitted their property details to the Prime Minister’s Office. Yet the office refuses to divulge this information before the public. The government claims the right to do so, as it is not legally mandatory to disclose such details. That is indeed the case. Even so, before 2013—the year Khil Raj Regmi was appointed as the head of government by stepping on dubious legal grounds—successive governments used to routinely publish such details. And such disclosure served a vital purpose.