Teamwork makes the dream work by Ifeoma Judith Onyebuchi
When the Nigerian government publicly committed to signing up to the Open Government Partnership (OGP) during the 2016 London anti-corruption summit, a strong wave of delight and euphoria from state and non state actors embraced the commitment, as it would provide a platform to eradicate the ills of governance and open government deficits plaguing the Nigerian State.
By the last quarter of that same year, the first National Action Plan (NAP) was drafted, critiqued and reviewed by stakeholders while ensuring commitment areas split across the 4 thematic areas are measurable, achievable and captures very salient critical issues fundamental to promoting good governance and national development.
In line with the OGP principles of co-creation and co-participation, government and CSOs began to progressively work towards achieving the milestones set in the NAP. Prior to Nigeria joining the OGP, research from reformers have pointed to how the lack of citizens participation, opacity and lack of technology fuelled inadequacies in governance processes. However, with the OGP membership, we became optimistic that these would soon become things of the past, as the OGP commitments are benchmarked on citizens participation, open data, technology and accountability. Moreso, these are very pivotal in the fight against corruption and a requisite for good governance.
The readiness from all actors to kickstart this partnership was evident in the zeal and common goal to transform Nigeria, as the OGP platform will finally incorporate open government initiatives especially from non state actors into the Nigerian OGP agenda.
Looking closely at many initiatives from CSOs, we can attest that some of these tools aim to promote fiscal transparency, citizens engagement and good governance through the use of technology. Plus, these are not far from what OGP tends to actualize. For example, the Public and Private Development Centre (PPDC)’s Budeshi is an open contracting tool, designed to demonstrate the utility of data standards by linking budget and procurement data to the expected service, and interestingly, this is in tandem with what government tends to achieve by implementing open contracting. Other tools such as Budgit NG’s Tracka, Connected Development (CODE)’s Follow the Money and Premium Times Centre for Investigative Journalism (PTCIJ)’s Udeme have all proven to be very viable in fostering citizens active participation in governance as well as engendering efficiency in public sector governance.
The inability to see the integration of these tools and / or attaining milestones based on the utilization of these tools in the OGP process unveils a gap in our open government approach.
This entire implementation process holds for us many lessons while our collective efforts start translating to impacts. For example; towards the tail end of 2017, Nigeria moved up 24 places in World Bank’s “Ease of Doing Business Report, there is the need to pay attention to low hanging fruits as well as harnessing readily available opportunities. These opportunities may not necessarily be funds but can be skills and technical expertise, experience gathered over the years in governance reform mechanisms.
One of the great commitments in the NAP is the full implementation of the open contracting data standards-OCDS. Implementing this commitment means absolute revolutionalization of public contracting in Nigeria through the use of technology while allowing citizens participate in shaping the outcome of governance. Recently, the Federal Government under the auspices of the Bureau of Public Procurement (BPP) began deploying the National Open Contracting Portal popularly known as NOCOPO. With this platform, data standards will be integrated into record keeping within government agencies, citizens can proactively access expenditure related data to track public resources of value and interest to them and the inadequacies associated in manual contracting will be eradicated.
Bearing in mind that open contracting is still finding its ground in Nigeria, and commitments in the OGP NAP are timelined, partnerships within the OGP framework should leverage available resources, expertise, initiatives and lessons available to attain greater and better results. The uniqueness of the OGP makes it easier to attain even greater reforms through a collaborative approach by allowing stakeholders bring on board their skills and available resources. OGP calls for true partnership through multi stakeholder approach by ensuring synergy among parties leverage resources, assets and experience to attain maximum results.
This will ensure accuracy, efficiency, timeliness and smooth implementation of commitment areas and most importantly, help avoid resource wastage and duplication of efforts.
