BudgIT, a civic organisation that facilitates societal change on Wednesday recommended that funds be strategically allocated for constituency projects to aid implementation.
Mr Oluseun Onigbinde, Director at BudgIT made this known at the presentation of the 2018 Tracka Federal Constituency Projects Tracking Report in Lagos.
According to him, constituency project is meant to drive dividends of democracy in the country and so the need to strategically allocate funds to achieve its objectives.
He added that through its project monitoring platform `Tracka’, BudgIT was able to identify other areas that would help in the implementation of constituency projects in the country.
Tracka is a platform designed by BudgIT to enable citizens follow up on budgetary capital expenditure and constituency projects in their respective communities and to enhance service delivery by all tiers of the Nigerian government.
“Tracka was established to address critical issues surrounding social and economic developments in Nigeria; make public funds work for the good of everyone and help to enhance the implementation of capital projects.
“In the 2018 report, it confirms that only 475 Zonal Intervention Projects (popularly called constituency projects) were completed out of 1,497 projects and the projects were tracked across 26 states between June 2018 and November 2019.
“From the 2018 Zonal Intervention Projects, a total of 1,497 projects were tracked while 475 projects were completed; 144 are currently ongoing; 536 had yet to start; 42 were considered abandoned; and 224 projects had unspecified locations,” he said.
Onigbinde said that Zonal Intervention Projects were public projects nominated by federal lawmakers to extend the dividends of democratic government to their various constituencies in the quest to unleash developments at the grassroots levels.
He noted that the report enunciated the most critical challenges of constituency projects in 2018 and highlighted some viable solutions to those challenges.
He said that Tracka’s ultimate goal was to open up public finances to the wider Nigerian populace, making them vanguards for service delivery and transparency.
Also, Mr Gabriel Okeowo, Principal Lead, BudgIT said that they consequently recommended in the report that strategic allocation of funds was crucial and the design of empowerment projects called for deeper thought.
Other recommendations are assessment needs to be prioritised; sabotage of capital projects must be checked and punished; and tax-funded government projects labelled as donations be dissuaded.
He listed some challenges observed during the project tracking as: the proliferation of empowerment items, alleged contract inflation, unspecified project locations, inadequate supply of equipment and materials to uncompleted structures.
Okeowo mentioned use of substandard products and poor awareness of budgetary provisions.
“Tracka expands citizens’ understanding of the budget; in particular on the contextual issues affecting them; and empowering them to demand accountability and budget implementation.
“We also note that only 30 per cent of funds have been released for 2019 constituency projects (at the time of preparing this report).
“We make bold to declare that poor release of funds for these projects will continue to affect implementation across the country,” he said.
Okeowo noted that Tracka’s influence was spreading through its focus communities as it had a presence in 586 local government areas across 26 states in the country.
He noted that they had tracked over 15,859 projects in 7,589 towns and organised over 7,612 town hall meetings across the country.
He said that with increasing appeals for these projects, they planned to move to all the 36 states of the federation.
“We are also glad to have fruitful collaboration with agencies of government like the Independent Corrupt Practices Commission (ICPC) to give credence and effectiveness to our project-tracking initiative.
“We call on government across all tiers to make concerted efforts to ensure citizens benefit from dividends of democracy.
“BudgIT plans to reach out to the leadership of the National Assembly on improving the nomination process of constituency projects.
