Minister of State, Budget and National Planning, Prince Clem Ikanade Agba, has charged members of the various Technical Working Groups for the implementation of the National Action Plans (2019 – August 2022) to join hands in order to achieve the desired result.
The minister gave this charge while addressing participants at the Open Government Partnership (OGP) second quarter, 2021 Thematic Working Groups (TWGs) workshop, held in Abuja.
Agba said that: “The thematic areas are believed not to stand on their own but fused together and therefore expected to be inter-connected in order to get better understanding of the different roles of the various thematic areas.”
He, therefore, urged participants to work towards bringing the thematic groups together to ensure a proper understanding of their roles.
According to him, “the National Action Plan 11 is a remarkable improvement of National Action programme 1 because of its seven thematic areas of concentration identified as a means towards getting ways to make a measurable positive impact on the ordinary citizens of Nigeria by identifying effective citizens participation in governance.”
The minister said that the second and current Action Plan had seven thematic areas with 16 commitments and the workshop was held to consider the Thematic areas identified as follows: Fiscal Transparency, Extractive Transparency, Anti-corruption, Access to Information, Citizens engagement, Inclusion and Diversity and Service Delivery.
Each area, according to the minister, demonstrated government’s effort towards deepening institutional and policy reforms to accentuate accelerated economic growth and cut corruption in Nigeria.
With the working groups as the engine room for the realization of the seven thematic areas, the minister stated that his presence at the workshop was to identify with the study groups and ensure that they were mobilized to gain knowledge that would help translate development across the thematic areas.
He noted that the objective of OGP was to help the Nigerian government focus its attention on improving Transparency, Accountability, Citizen participation and responsiveness of the government through technology innovation.
The minister said that the Federal government was poised to ensure that citizens understood its activities through the workshop.
National Coordinator, OGP, Dr Anne Nzegwu, had, in her welcome remarks, said that the purpose of the TWG was to strengthen the implementation of the 2nd National Action Plan for better and far-reaching progress with its implementation beyond the outcome of the 1st NAP, as reported by the review of the 1st NAP by Independent Reporting Mechanism (IRM).
She said that “by the extension of the implementation cycle of the 2nd National Action Plan to August 2022 and seeing that we have barely a year to this deadline, the goal is to get better results towards the assessment of the 2nd National Action Plan by RIM; to synergize with the Thematic Working Group in the implementation of the 2nd National Action Plan; and, to assess the level of implementation of each commitment in the National Action, among others.
In an interview with journalists, the Co-Chair, Fiscal Transparency and Convener Good Governance Team, Mr Tunde Salman, said that “Open Government Partnership (OGP) is a co-operation platform initiative that crystallizes the agenda of Government and makes both the citizens and government to come together to ensure transparency in fiscal policies of government.”
Hassan Dodo
Director, Information
BNP.
23/6/2021
