Civic Participation and Accountability: Empowering Citizens to Shape Governance

Looking at Nigeria specifically, I believe that when it comes to democracy, it's not all bad, right? Because Nigeria could be like, oh yeah, the highest prevalence, but at least right now, they say that Nigeria is the oldest democracy in the continent.

So I think we're not doing badly, even if we're struggling, kicking and screaming to the finishing line.

at every point.

But I also know that you mentioned, you know, that young people, one of the things they do is, you know, being very active on social media.

I think the whole beat around what makes our democracy very interesting is the freedom of the presence of speech, the social media.

And so the issue around accountability still remains very much the radar in terms of you know being able to have these platforms to do that but just for the purpose of this conversation can we look at some practical ways you know that ordinary nigerians can hold government officials and institutions accountable i know we've mentioned this you know using these platforms but yeah maybe we may want to address this a lot more broadly

great um From a civic tech solution perspective, over the years, in conjunction with a budget, for instance, there have been a number of civic tech solutions that have been developed, leveraging on public data.

When I say public data, especially data around projects that have been implemented across the country.

One of those civic tech solutions, it's what we refer to as GovSpend.

Govspend.ng you can access that.

It enables people to see clearly what projects have been fully contracted out and government has released the sums for those projects.

So what that means is that individuals who access Govspend will see clearly the projects that were designated in the national budget for which funds have now been released and they can actually track those projects and say, for instance, we are in Community A and you've gone to GovPen and you've seen that all the sums regarding the particular project have been released, the contractors are known, but you live in Community A and you can't see anything regards that.

That becomes a basis for you to then at least reach out and write to the Conscience Ministry Use your social media platform, for instance, to release that.

So that becomes a practical way to deal with that.

There's also your tracker.org, which is also implemented by budget.

The tracker mobile app is accessible and can be downloaded from app stores.

This also enables you to see clearly the projects that have been designated to be implemented in your communities.

You can then draw attention of government entities, of legislators to those types of projects.

In that way, community can coalesce around those issues and then use them to engage their political actors.

So these are practical ways of using civic tech solutions that are available to then engage on government accountability issues.

Like I did say too, Communities can organize as a huge coalition to raise their issues with their different government representatives.

So as you know, politicians, especially at the National Assembly level, are meant to have consistency offices where people can engage with them.

These days, this is broader now.

They have social media handles that people can reach them on.

They have telephone numbers that people can reach them on.