logologo
  • Home
  • Education
  • Health
  • Entertainment
  • Business
  • Politics
  • Technology
  • Sports
  • Forum
  • Submit an Article
  • Subscribe
  • Home
  • Education
  • Health
  • Entertainment
  • Business
  • Politics
  • Technology
  • Sports
  • Forum
  • Submit an Article
  • Subscribe

Why Nigeria open government partnership (OGP) seems to be floundering

  • By DECENT eNews
  • on March 24, 2020
  • in Politics
Views: 65

Many reasons led to the disintegration of the open government partnership (OGP) in Nigeria. The first was with how practitioners understood the OGP itself. Many of them adduced its emergence to David Cameron’s 2016 London anti-corruption summit.

Cameron was not its precursor. For in the early ’80s after Sir Tim Berners-Lee became the father of the internet, he found out he had to make a critical decision on whether or not to make the internet ‘open,’ available for public use or keep it confined for use within the intelligence circles. His eventual decision to allow everyone to access the internet was based on the fact that its openness would dismantle all forms of opacity usually ascribed to governance. From that time onwards towards the dawn of the millennium, there have been meetings among top people in business, politicians, and social circles which took place to examine the idea of openness and what advantage it would bring to governance.

Thus by 2016 when Cameron convened his London anti-corruption summit, two things acted as catalysts for Nigeria to sign on to the OGP. The one was that a Thambo Mbeki Report on Illicit Financial Flows, https://www.uneca.org/stories/high-level-panel-illicit-financial-flows-africa-launch-its-final-report, had said that $50billion leave Africa per annum, a figure that doubled official development assistance for Africa. What made Nigeria’s case a pertinent one was that on the eve of that London anti-corruption summit, Cameron had said that Nigeria was a fantastically corrupt country apparently because more than 90% of its oil revenues were frittered and hidden in safe havens.

So, in not realizing that the OGP idea is a process rather than an event, Nigeria OGP has been unable to use the platform to put food on the tables of Nigerians, https://guardian.ng/opinion/for-ogp-to-put-food-on-nigerian-tables/.

But most importantly for the OGP failure in Nigeria and in countries which practice it is that it completely ignores the input of the lawmaking process. It focuses on a strong individual – a Mr. President or his attorney general, a governor or his attorney general who supervises the thematic working groups with a leading CSO as ‘co-chairs.’ There are no lawmakers.

An equally important reason why the OGP in Nigeria is seemingly in disarray is that it has often misused the right tools. The OGP secretariat has suggested ten tools – local CSO expertise, an independent reporting mechanism, point of contact manual, establishment of working groups, peer exchange, linking with OGP guidelines and a linkage with the SDGs, multilateral partnerships, and the use of OGP webinars – for the establishment of a new national action plan. That has not always been the case, however. These rules of thumb and rubrics are hardly followed.

By Bob MajiriOghene Etemiku

Email address: [email protected]

0 Comments
Leave a comment

Cancel reply

You must be logged in to post a comment.

Categories
  • Business (23)
  • Education (197)
  • Entertainment (96)
  • Health (35)
  • Politics (72)
  • Sports (37)
  • Technology (26)
Just in
  • Corporal punishment is useless in school philosophy
  • Why men cheat on woman they claim to love
  • Debt trap after graduation
  • Pandemic alarm and healthcare in Africa: The sleeping scarecrow
  • Are youths ready for leadership?

About Us

DECENT eNews is an Australian online educative news project and a subsidiary of Decent Group International Ltd Pty. The primary aim of the project is to create a platform for passionate and enthusiastic content writers to showcase their talents to the world. The current project addresses issues of the cost of publication, exposure and inaccessibility to the right audience as faced by content writers in less privileged societies and many parts of the globe. DECENT eNews gives the content writers full rights and privileges to the write-ups so that they can establish direct contacts and enhance personal networks and outreach.

  • Forum
  • Education
  • Health
  • Entertainment
  • Business
  • Politics
  • Technology
  • Sports

Contact Info

DECENT eNews
ACN : 629 627 032
[email protected]
Brisbane Queensland
Australia

Home      About      Contact       Privacy       Terms of Use      ©2018- 2021 DECENT eNews. All rights reserved.