Accountability: CS Harps On Citizens’ Engagement On Budget Tracking In Kaduna

Chairman, Citizens’ arm of Open Government Partnership (OGP) in Kaduna State, Mallam Mustapha Jumare on Monday harped on the need for healthy citizens’ engagement by Civil Society working around budget as a means of holding policymakers to account.

Kaduna is the first State to subscribe to OGP at sub-national level, the development that allow the citizens to be part of all the budget processes, thereby making most government’s businesses transparent enough for citizens to engage for the purpose of transparency and accountability in public sector. 

PPDC is supporting Follow Taxes, a-CAPH, LANW, Gobroadsheet, Connected Democracy and KAYCDEV on project monitoring especially in the areas of education, health and infrastructures in Kaduna State.

Speaking at a one-day Kaduna budget tracking town hall meeting with chairmen of School Based Management Committee (SBMC), traditional leaders, youth organizations, community-based organization (CBOs), policymakers and the Media, Jumare, who doubled as Co-chair of Kaduna State Maternal Accountability Mechanism (KADMAM) said, citizens must know how their monies are being spent by their political representatives. 

According to him, “we know that civil society working around budget in Kaduna have been engaging citizens, but, we have to do more. We appreciate the logistics support by the Public and Private Development Centre (PPDC).

“But, we have a lot of work to do to sensitize our citizens on how money is being realized and how it is being spent which is why we have open contracting data. We have opened the health sector and we have also opened the education sector where all of can engage. 

“I am happy we have traditional leaders from communities where a lot of ongoing projects are located and that showed that, the organizers targeted the right people for this meeting. We have to collectively engage the system to make it work the way it should”, he added.

The Lead, Follow Taxes in Kaduna who stood-in for PPDC at the meeting, Saied Tafida PhD, told community representatives to own projects in their jurisdiction and constantly be in touch with both the implementing agencies and contractors to ensure quality projects as captured in supporting documents are executed.

Public and Private Development Centre (PPDC) is a non-governmental organization created to increase citizens’ participation in governance processes in a way that improves the integrity of public and private sector processes.

Sola Ojo Sent In This Report (Monday 16-03-2020)