AMAC Partner CSOs To Promote Open Governance, citizen-centric policies

By Blessing Otobong-Gabriel 

As part of its strategic moves to fulfil its campaign promises of ensuring open governance that is citizen-centred, the Abuja Municipal Area Council has partnered DEAN Initiative to promote open governance and implement citizen-centric policies.

The Consultant and Development Partner, AMAC, Abiodun Essiet said on Wednesday during a two-day workshop organised by the area council that in an Open Government Partnership, governments work with civil society to create action plans with concrete reforms. This model helps to ensure citizens play a role in shaping and promoting accountability in governance. 

Essiet added that the workshop which was tagged "AMAC Open Government Partnership Sensitization and Action II Development Workshop" centered around open procurement and continued citizen's participation in budgetary process and AMAC happen to be the only local government area in Nigeria to join the OGP global, indicating their commitment to promote accountability and transparency in government process.

Also speaking, Director of Admin, AMAC, Taiwo Atahiru Kakubu reiterated the council's commitment to achieving the OGP plan, saying AMAC have a very open procurement process for everybody to participate and encouraged women to also key in, adding that women are presently very few compared to men in the procurement processes. 

This flexibility is to ensure that what the citizens want is what government does, not to decide for the citizens. Whatever projects they prioritized or choose is what we implement for them, and encouraged people to always feel free to bring their inputs in terms of ideas and life-transforming projects so that we can work together to see how they can be actualized.

Also, the Lead Team, Dean Initiative, Semiye Michael said as a civil society organisation our responsibility is to continue to support government to ensure that they introduce good governance enablers that ensure that citizens benefit a lot better from the government. 

"We noticed that the concentration of governance has been on the national governments over the years, but their constitutional responsibility for the local government and when you engage the president and the ministers, they'll begin to tell you that, we should also ensure that we make citizens understand that there are roles local government should play in development.

He explained that it was important to ensure that we mainstream the commitment and the participation of the citizens encouraging budget. Most local governments in Nigeria do not involve citizens in budget creation. In most local governments, no citizens know what their budget looks like. So we try to use the first action plan with a mark to break that.