Open governance key to deepening fight against corruption- Expert
Mr Monday Osasah, the Executive Director of African Centre for Leadership, Strategy and Development, says Open Government Partnership remains a major tool to deepen the fight against corruption in the country.
Osasah stated this in Gombe on Friday during an interview with journalists at the closing ceremony of a three-day training for state and non-state actors in Gombe State.
The training which was facilitated by CentreLSD with support from MacArthur Foundation was aimed at developing the Gombe State OGP State Action Plan.
Osasah said one of the benefits of OGP was to ensure that governance is run on the template of transparency and accountability.
He explained that openness in governance meant everything that represented secrecy in governance had been removed for citizens to engage with the governance process.
“The whole idea about the open government partnership especially when the president signed Nigeria up to the open government partnership in 2016 was to deepen transparency and accountability; and what that means is to deepen the fight against corruption.
“If there is no corruption, there will be a lot of development in all places.
“There will be infrastructure, all that corruption has stolen away in terms of development will now be common place for citizens to live useful lives and fulfill their potentials.”
Speaking on why his team was in Gombe State, the Executive Director said they were in the state to train stakeholders on what OGP was and “we decided to step it further by supporting them as well to develop the state action plan.
“The state plan is based on the realities of the state. It is more like doing a contextual analysis of the state to really know what should be the make up of the state action plan.
“That is what we have done in the last few days and we are happy with the participation that we got to the extent that the people were able to choose the thematic areas they are going to work in.
“They chose three thematic areas: service delivery, physical transparency and citizens’ engagement,” he said.
One of the participants, Mr Ibrahim Yusuf, the Gombe State chairman of Association of Non-governmental Organisations (NGOs) said the training was timely in view of the need to ensure citizen’s participation in governance.
Yusuf said the participation of citizens in how their state was being run would help them ask questions and demand accountability which would help in the fight against corruption.
Also, Dr Erisa Danladi, Executive Director, Motherhen Development Foundation commended CentreLSD, OGP and MacArthur Foundation for the training.
Danladi stressed that the training was a wake up call to all stakeholders in the state to strengthen citizen’s participation in governance.
She appealed to citizens of the state to always participate actively whenever there were calls for townhalls or any engagement that would strengthen open governance, transparency and accountability in the state.
