Nigeria joins steering committee of Open Govt Partnership

Nigeria has been elected into the global steering committee of the open government partnership to serve alongside France, Argentina and Romania for a period of three years.

The Global Steering Committee is the executive decision making body of OGP,whose duty is to develop promote and safeguard the values,principles and rules of partnership.

It is made up of governments and civil society representatives.

Open Government Partnership, OGP is a multi-stakeholder initiative that focuses on improving government transparency, accountability and responsiveness to citizens through technology and innovation.

Speaking at the OGP conference in Abuja, Nigeria’s capital, the Attorney General of the Federation and Minister of Justice, Abubakar Malami who was represented by the Solicitor General of the Federation, Dayo Akpata said that Nigeria joined the steering committee to further deepen the reforms already initiated by government to confront corruption and block leakages of resources that would be used to fund development.

According to him, “government collaborated with non state actors and civil society organisations to create a National Action Plan, NAP, which covered four thematic areas including Fiscal transparency, anti-corruption, access to information and citizen engagement”

Mr Malami also said that government is working with civil society organisations in the area of open budgeting to make the process more inclusive and feedback oriented through publication of citizens’ guide and deployment of a project implementation monitoring app.

The Attorney General of the Federation assured that Nigeria, being the only country representing Africa in the OGP steering committee would uphold the ideals of the organisation through regular sharing of experience and cross fertilisation of ideas with other African countries.