African Centre for Leadership, Strategy & Development
African Centre for Leadership, Strategy & Development
In 2011, government leaders and civil society advocates came together to create a unique partnership—one that combines these powerful forces to promote transparent, participatory, inclusive and accountable governance.
Seventy-eight countries and 76 local governments—representing more than two billion people—along with thousands of civil society organizations are members of the Open Government Partnership (OGP).
In 2017, the MacArthur Foundation supported the Centre on the project tagged ‘Promoting Transparency and Accountability in the governance process through the implementation of the Open Government Partnership in Nigeria. The project focused essentially on opening the governance space for Citizens voices and inputs in the process and to make government responsive to citizens.
This was implemented leveraging on a fourteen-point commitment, known as the National Action Plan, which laid out the pathway for fulfilling Nigeria’s obligations on the OGP- covering fiscal transparency, access to information, anti-corruption, and citizens’ engagement. The ultimate result the Centre set out to achieve was to improve accountability standards and contribute to reduction in corruption risk and exposure in public sector operations. The intervention led to to a lot of successes.
The new project “promoting accountability in Nigeria through engagement and implementation of the open government partnership (OGP) II” is borne out of the need to institutionalize and sustain the OGP in Nigeria and consolidate on the successes recorded in the pilot project. The project basically proposes strengthening of the legal framework and institutional support for the open government partnership in Nigeria. It will draw on lessons from the previous award and the recommendations of the Independent Reporting Mechanism; an evaluation system that ranks progress of national actions plans of OGP implementing countries. Nigeria’s implementation of the OGP through the 14 commitments of the first national plan achieved amongst others the following; Open and participatory budget process that culminated in increased allocation for the development of critical infrastructure; Open and transparent contracting process through the establishment of the NOCOPO portal; Improved transparency and accountability on assets recovery, management and monitoring; Improved compliance with the Freedom of Information Act and proactive disclosure of information by agencies; Facilitated the culture of openness in the governance process by the development of a dialogue mechanism between government and citizens; and increased sub-national engagement and participation in the OGP process in Nigeria.
Despite these successes, opportunities for deepening and mainstreaming the successes abound. And with just about 17 States out of 36 signed up to the OGP, the need to deepen the engagement and ensure that more states embrace and sign up, and also advocate for the strengthening of the legal framework and institutional support for the open government partnership in Nigeria is crucial. The Independent Reporting Mechanism report 2017 – 2019, in one of its key recommendation, reinforced the emphasis on strengthening the legal reform framework and institutional support for OGP in Nigeria. In addition, the emphasis on inclusion in the new action plan presents a veritable opportunity to mobilize citizens to participate in the governance process to ensure no one is left behind in line with the dictates of the sustainable development goals.
The goal of the project is to strengthen the legal framework and institutional support for the open government partnership in Nigeria
The OGP Lead at Centre LSD speaks on “How The Open Government Partnership Initiative is Aiding the Fight Against Corruption in Nigeria” in commemoration of the 2019 International Anti-Corruption Day: #UniteAgainstCorruption.
The project is implemented by the African Centre for Leadership, Strategy & Development (Centre LSD), a non-profit, non-governmental organization established under Nigerian laws to build strategic leadership for sustainable development in Africa. The Centre’s mission is to work with forces of positive change to empower citizens to transform society.
Executive Director, African Centre for Leadership, Strategy & Development (Centre LSD)
I bring you warm greetings from our Founding Executive Director, Dr. Otive Igbuzor and indeed all of us at Centre LSD. We are particularly delighted to be part of this One-day stakeholders meeting geared towards evolving an effective and result oriented Strategy to bring Kogi State into the fold of Open Government Partnership (OGP) States in Nigeria.
As we may be aware OGP is a global coalition of reformers from Government and Civil Society -working to make governance systems all over the world transparent, participatory and accountable to truly serve and empower Citizens. At present 15 States in Nigeria have signed up and domesticated the OGP and Centre LSD was very involved in this process in majority of these States. Our experience has also shown that some of the major reasons why some States have not warmed up on to coming on board is a lack of proper understanding of the workings of the OGP. This has often led to mistrust, misconception and sometimes irrational resistance from the Government operatives who should otherwise champion and be in the forefront of mobilizing Strategic support for the initiative.
This is more the reason why your gathering today is crucial. Being a Strategy session, it is my hope that at the end of your deliberations, you would have been able to effectively craft a pathway that will galvanize, moderate directions, guide actions, map and mobilize all the various actors and stakeholders that needs to come together to move this process forward.
Let me suggest a simple but effective Strategic approach that is recommended by our partner organization, Institute of Strategic Management, Nigeria. This is strategizing from the Domain of Strategy, this model takes into cognizance four major elements in strategy making, they are the objective(s), the Means, Moves and peculiarity of the prevailing Environmental forces impacting on achieving the desired results. This taken in conjunction with popular Strategy diagnostic tools such as SWOT and PESTLE am sure would enrich your session.
I would have loved to be physically present with you all, but I was already committed to be at Ekiti State today, incidentally for the validation meeting of their OGP State action Plan. However, representing me is our Director of Strategy, Mr. Itia Otabor who I believe would be a great resource to you.
Let me specially commend the doggedness and commitment of the convener of this session, Mr. Idris Abdul, Executive Director of Conscience for Human Rights & Conflict Resolution (CHRCR), whose synergistic relationship and partnership with Centre LSD is one of mutual fulfillment and convergence of interests and aspirations.
I look forward to us coming together again at the very earliest, but this time to be implementing the next steps in our definite move towards actualizing our clearly articulated objective of onboarding Kogi State in the OGP Family.
Thank You All.
