By Angela Atabo
Connected Development (CODE) and the MacArthur Foundation on Wednesday organised capacity building workshop for lawmakers on effective constituency service delivery.
The News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) reports that the measure was to also deepen citizens’ interest in government spendings thereby addressing corruption.
Mr Kingsley Agu, Programmes Manager for CODE, said this at a Constituency Project Workshop for Kaduna Legislators and Aides organised by the organisations in Abuja
Agu, who is also the Project Lead for Deepening Citizen’s Interest in Government Spending and Accompanying Corrupt Practices (DeSPAAC) project, said that the measure became necessary to help the lawmakers and their aides develop capacity in data management.
According to him, CODE is seeking to also address ineffective service delivery of constituency projects in the three Senatorial Zone in Kaduna State, by utilising the FollowTheMoney (FTM)model.
“The workshop will also build their capacity in monitoring and evaluation, inclusive budgeting, social accountability, citizen participation, and gender-responsive service delivery.
“CODE is building the capacity of citizens to track projects, deepen the Open Government Partnership (OGP) in Kaduna state as well as ensure that gender is mainstreamed.
“Engagement is getting better but it is not yet where we want it to be,we want a system where that barrier in terms of communication between constituencies and their representatives in the National Assembly is broken completely.”
Agu said the project was also strengthening Open Government Partnership adding that 118 constituency projects that were budgeted for in 2020 and 2021 in Kaduna State were currently being tracked by Community Development Charter (CDC) in collaboration with Community Monitoring Teams.
Mr Dayo Olaide, Deputy Director ,MacArthur Foundation, said that supporting FollowTheMoney has helped in mobilising citizens and also provide an accountability platform to monitor projects and determine its value to them.
“Do you know that 65 agencies have never been audited since they were created? But year in year out, they receive appropriation.
“As long as we do not hold these people to account, they will keep collecting appropriation and refuse to be audited.”
Also speaking , Dr Nwachukwu Ani, Lead, Research and Policy, CODE,in his presentation,said that the foundation of effective representation was consultation and responsiveness to citizen engagement.
Ani said that this would enable citizens have safe communities for democratic consolidation thereby ensuring strategic constituency outreaches for policy engagement and development Management.
According him, Nigeria has enlightened citizens who want problems solved, but lack of attention by the government to sit with the people to address the problem was the issue.
He therefore , urged the lawmakers to go beyond constituency projects and open up ‘safe” spaces for people to engage and communicate with them, to achieved from the constituency projects.
Representative of Jema’a/Sanga Federal Constituency in Kaduna State, Shehu Garba, said the workshop provided an opportunity to evaluate the impact of projects that had been executed by members of the National Assembly.
Garba said that the workshop has also put everyone on their toes to ensure proper execution of projects.
“We must begin to do things right wherever we find ourselves, it is an aggregation of all these efforts that will contribute to the wellbeing of the society.
” It might look like a very small isolated program but I think when we have more of such, overtime, we will begin to have a change for the better”.(NAN)
