Well, the idea came to be in 1999. At that time, Nigeria had just emerged from almost 15 years of military dictatorship. The notion of true democratic norms was almost alien to the people again. At least, those who were born some 20 years before that had not tasted or known what democracy entailed. To many, it did not go beyond the fact that an election was conducted, some people were elected or they rigged themselves into positions. What happened to government, to many people, was entirely the business of and concern of those at the corridors of power. But then, you and I know that democracy goes far beyond this poor notion. Democracy is about participation. It is about some few elected people taking certain decisions on behalf of the people based on the desire of those people. So, we felt at that time that if democracy would have meaning, there must be a mechanism in place to ensure that politicians do not take the full advantage of the ignorance of the people of their rights. The present constituency cultivation project is part of the monitoring activities we started since that time.
In what way has your commission carried out the task of monitoring democracy?
It was an uphill task and we were quite aware of this from the beginning. We knew the enormous resources it would require and this was not only in the area of finances but also in the area of human resources. We needed personnel to do the monitoring, collate information and data that we used in confronting elected officials in their respective areas. From Ogun State, we moved to other states of the federation and by this year, we had been able to extend our operations to 18 states. What our people simply do is to monitor activities of governments, be it state or local governments in their areas. We observe projects and how much the governments claim to have spent on them. In many cases, we have compared the amounts spent on projects with the sizes and quality of the projects to arrive at our judgment on whether there had been fraud or not. Another area we have focused on is in the area of budgeting. We have tried to ensure that governments, especially in local governments comply with the provisions of the budget for each year and we encourage the electorate to ask them questions on how far they have gone in certain areas that enjoy attention in the budget. In our monthly magazine, we publish details of the allocations received by local governments that we obtain directly from the source in Abuja making it pretty difficult for government officials to tell their people that they have not received allocations. All these, we believe, will help remove the secrecy around governance.
