By Joseph Edegbo :
Civil Society Organisations in Kaduna State have decried the lukewarm attitude by ministries and agencies of the Kaduna State Government to respond to requests for obtaining information.
Such uncooperative stance negates the goal of the Open Government Partnership which Kaduna is a signatory and Freedom of Information Act which needs no domestication, they argue.
The CSOs made their views known at the just concluded 2-day Public Policy Dialogue on Public Procurement Process in Kaduna State held in Zaria.
It was Organised by Partnership to Engage, Reform and Learn in collaboration with Open Government Partnership, OGP.
The Workshop was not impressed to note that, of the 23 Local Government Areas in the State, only 5 have their information on projects on portal.
Participants who were drawn from across the CSO’s, Academia, MDAs, Legislators, Media, Persons With Disability and other professional bodies including Council for the Regulation of Engineering in Nigeria also frowned at the low level of participation by top Government functionaries such as commissioners to make commitments.
Describing the workshop as a fantastic engagement with an assemblage of all relevant stakeholders, the participants stressed the need for the executives to be on the same page with citizens for the interest of the people.
The workshop afforded the participants to among others, identify gaps hindering the timely and qualitative proactive disclosure of public procurement data for diverse stakeholders’ needs, and secure realistic and time bound commitment to resolve identified gaps in both Public Procurement and disclosure of public procurement data.
Meanwhile, the Kaduna State Government has approved the training of Procurement Officers for deployment to MDAs .
A Representative of the Public Procurement Authority to the Workshop, informed the workshop that by so doing, the ministries and agencies would strictly face their core mandates, while the officers would do the needful on projects domciled in those areas.