By Sani Idris
The Founder, Connected Developer (CODE), a Non-Governmental Organisation (NGO), Mr Hamzat Lawal, has restated its commitment in enlightening grassroot people on ways of demanding good governance and accountability from their leaders.
Lawal restated this commitment when he led a team from the Organisation on a courtesy visit to the Commissioner of Local Government Affairs on Thursday in Kaduna.
He said demand for good governance should be at its peak as another electioneering year was fast approaching.
Lawal said that political office holders must be held accountable to deliver on their promises to their constituents.
He, also said it was time for Nigerians, especially those at the grassroots, to begin reaping the benefits of democracy.
Lawal said that CODE would work with the 23 Local Government Chairmen in Kaduna state for improved service delivery at the grassroots.
“The initiative is borne out of the collaboration between us and Ministry of Local Government Affairs.
“The essence of this visit to the ministry is to explore collaborations on how to ensure that intervention programmes under constituency projects by the Federal Government gets to the grassroots.
“We are leveraging on this platform where the commissioner of the Local Government mobilise all the Chairmen in Kaduna State.
“We will engage directly with the chairmen to explore collaboration and possibly sign an MoU and come up with a joint tool for needs assessment.
”We will also do budget tracking, organise town hall meetings by engaging and mobilising community members to hold government accountable and take ownership of their projects,” he said.
Lawal said that the National Assembly had voted for local government autonomy.
He added that the NGO wanted to ensure that beyond legal and regulatory framework, it moved ahead to ensure effective implementation of the local government autonomy.
According to him this will ensure that resources are directly put into the lead cal governments accounts.
“We want to ensure that the money that will be transferred to the LG accounts will be used judiciously.
”We will also engage in enhancing the local government capacity for fiscal responsibility and how they can do citizens-oriented budget,” Lawal said.
In his remark, the Commissioner, Dr. Shehu Muhammad, said CODE was doing a commendable work in Kaduna state.
He said CODE engagement of the local government chairmen would make them see the need to be transparent in discharging their mandates to their constituents.
Muhammad said it would make the chairmen and see the need to do projects which were of long life impacts rather that pouring praising on them when giving out money to their constituents.
“You will find out that some of the Chairmen even exhaust their recurrent expenditure in the first quota of the year.
”When you engage and train them very well on budget planning and tracking, it will go along way in achieving the objectives of the government at grassroots,” he said.
The commissioner urged CODE to engage deeper in helping the local government chairmen in tracking and implementing their budgets.
“The key challenges the Chairmen have are how to develop a realistic budget.
”I don’t see them even nearing to make their budgets into reality, all they do is transfer figures and calculate.
“In the first week of implementation, you will find out that they can’t continue.
”You also need to do more in enlightening the citizens by reshaping their thinking of assuming that the Chairmens duty is to provide for even their personal financial needs, the perception need to change,” he said
Muhammad assured the ministry’s support and cooperation in collaborating with the NGO to ensure local Government chairmen were kept abreast of their responsibilities especially to their constituencies.
The News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) reports that Lawal later held meeting with the Chairmen after separate one with the commissioner.
The Chairmen asked questions and thanked CODE for its commitment and assured to cooperate in giving necessary support and information needed to enhance transparency and accountability of their respective administrations. (NAN)
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