Snake in the Monkey’s Shadow by Ugochi Ekwueme
“Snake in the monkey’s shadow” is a popular martial arts film released in the late 70’s. It basically highlights a story of how a vicious fighter who was an expert in the snake style of kung fu (which was considered the deadliest kung fu style at the time) was defeated by a fighter who used the monkey style of kung fu. Now, I was really young when I watched this film, but based on recent happenings in our government, I think we can agree that the monkey style is still a champion today.
In a country of above 180 million people, out of which 53.5% are living below poverty level, it is worrisome that we blame animals for the misappropriation of funds in the public sector due to our inability to track public funds. Very soon, our lawmakers would probably pass a bill, enabling them to jail these “thieving animals” in the event of a re-occurrence. Sound like a joke right? Sadly not…
Transparency International (TI) recently released the 2017 Corruption Perception Index (CPI) with Nigeria scoring 27% and ranking 148 out of 180 ranked countries. Since 2012, we have scored an average of 27% in the CPI, 6 years later, even with a government whose mandate is constantly being sung as fighting corruption, we still rank remarkably low. According to TI, most of the countries who ranked low this year have one thing in common which is the threat to freedom of expression.
For the past 2 years in Nigeria, civil society organizations have come out in their numbers to campaign against the NGO bill using the #SayNoToNGOBill. The proposed NGO bill seeks to shrink the voices of the civil society organizations and would seriously undermine the activities of people working to fight discrimination, improve health and education, and cut off the vital social and economic services provided by these groups.
Nevertheless, we must commend those in government who are resilient in ensuring the governments transcendence to becoming more accountable and transparent through the Open Government Partnership (OGP) initiative is actualised. The OGP has provided a co-creation hub for civil society and government to implement initiatives that can promote the transparency and accountability of the government. Currently in our 1st National Action Plan (NAP), we have made commitments towards implementing initiatives such as Open Budget, Open Contracting, Access to Information and Beneficial Ownership amongst others. All these commitments have one thing in common — accessibility of data.
Accessibility of data plays a huge role in promoting transparency in governance by providing citizens with information on public funds and projects. According to Open Contracting Partnership (OCP), 57% of foreign bribery cases prosecuted under the OECD Anti-Bribery Convention involved bribes to obtain public contracts. While we may not have the exact statistic, it is safe to say that this could be one of the reasons why most Nigerian government institutions are not willing to disclose their contracting information. In the 2017 Freedom of Information Compliance and Transparency Rankings organized by the Public and Private Development Centre (PPDC), only 3 institutions proactively disclosed their contracting information on their website while only 30 out of 166 provided the full contract information that was requested for.
After years of requesting for contract information using the FOIA and carrying out project monitoring, we realised that with the current system in place it was difficult to link contracts to public service delivery. This is why we launched Budeshi, our open contracting platform. Budeshi provides citizens with access to contract information of projects being carried out in our communities and to showcase its relevance to government institutions. The Budeshi platform not only publishes contract information but links the contract information across all procurement stages up till project implementation with the help of the Open Contracting Data Standards (OCDS) This will ultimately ensure that taxpayers monies are ultimately offering optimal service delivery to citizens.
We applaud the initiative taken by the Bureau of Public Procurement (BPP) to launch an open contracting portal, (NOCOPO) in 2016 and we enjoin them to take the platform to the next level where every other government parastatal is mandated to run an OCDS integrated open contracting platform. This will not only address the issues mentioned above but set us on a path to rebuffing the “fantastically corrupt” image perceived by other countries.
With an open contracting system, contract funds are easily traced and ‘snakes’ or ‘monkeys’ won’t have access to them in any way.
With access to information, citizens can participate in governance by lending their voice and identifying the relevance of items included in the budget to their needs. And finally, freedom of expression by both journalists and civil societies will not only call corrupt officials to order but also speak up when irregularities are identified during investigations. If these measures are seriously taken up, by the time the CPI 2018 is released, Nigeria might have a rating of 45% (My Wakandan Wish).
As citizens of this great nation, we owe it to ourselves to get our voters card, come out in our numbers and vote for the right government. If we don’t, we may have a country where “animals” take over the seat of power in 2019.
Now going to watch “Snake in the Monkey’s shadow” for the umpteenth time… I cannot try and come and go and kill myself (in Dr Sid’s voice)
