Learning in Lagos

Last week I returned to Lagos, It was for the most part; hot, sweaty and uncomfortable, rather unlike Ireland at the moment, brrrrrr! Despite the weather, the week-long seminar I attended was full of energy and commitment. Catholic Relief Services (a sister agency of Trocaire that I am on secondment with in Nigeria), Human Rights Watch and Chatham House are developing a project across seven countries in the Gulf of Guinea, Africa. Civil Society and Church partners will be supported to monitor and analyse transparency in the extractives industry and in host government budgetary processes. By understanding revenues accruing to the state, analysing budget commitments, people can better analyse and challenge the performance of their governments.

Underlying the project is the fundamental philosophy that citizens should benefit more broadly from state resources, especially those that derive from oil and other precious minerals. Without miring you in the complexity of the subject and for fear of displaying my scant (but growing) knowledge, I suggest that you look at the website of the Publish What You Pay Campaign; www.publishwhatyoupay.org . To distil the essence of the PWYP coalition; citizens in resource-rich are largely unaware of the commercial agreements entered into between their states and multi-national oil companies, lack knowledge on the revenues entering state finances from these sources and thus have little oversight on Government budget processes and subsequent spending on social services. This lacuna opens up the possibility for large-scale corruption.

Language can act as a bridge or barrier. All professionals are guilty of creating terminology that is decipherable only by those within their ranks. I hope my readers are not so afflicted! The language of the oil industry is dense and opaque and is confounded further by complex legal and taxation frameworks. Budgeting and public policy are not the subject matter of many a fireside-conversation; are they? The question is how can and why should the average person engage with such arcane subjects? A recent report from Human Rights Watch on Rivers State Local Government in Nigeria provides some answers.


Budget monitoring at a local level

Nigeria has squandered billions of dollars yearly in oil revenues over decades. Corruption and mismanagement of resources extends from the federal to the local government level. In Nigeria, State and Local Government account for close to fifty per cent of all government expenditure. Despite Local Government revenues increasing four fold in the period 1999 to 2006, the impact at a local level has been negligible.

The report illustrates how such waste leads to the infringement of basic human rights, in this case health and education in Rivers State (one of the states in the Niger Delta) , Nigeria. Many of the schools in the 23 Local Government Areas have just bare walls and nothing else. There are schools with; no desks, chairs, books, no running water nor toilet facilities. The scale of the neglect is a disgrace. The dereliction of duty by government officials is a disgrace.


Anger can dissipate into acceptance and resignation or maybe a call to action. Many Nigerians are angry and frustrated (talk to taxi drivers who queue for hours for petrol!) and must organise at a local level to demand accountability from their officials. People need to gain access to local budgets and monitor the delivery of local services.

It is a great challenge for people to rise above self and factional interests to demand more and recognise their collective concerns. Trocaire are planning to support such budget monitoring activities across 6 church dioceses in the coming year. It will be a challenging process for our partners to engage in, challenging entrenched power structures at a local level. The budgets are often a closely guarded secret and treated as the private property of Local Government chairpersons (in 2003, all 774 local government chairpersons were men!) and their officials.

Why is collective action so difficult? It is in many countries and communities; in this country there are a myriad of reasons but when one considers that Nigerians have experienced close to 30 years of military rule since independence in 1960, one can understand people’s reticence to involve themselves in politics and civic life. Instead for instance, disaffected youth are organised to act as militias or for shows of campaigning prowess during the election period. In the short term, the youth will earn much-needed money but afterwards most elected officials will largely ignore them and other citizens until the next election.

The Human Rights Watch reports monumental waste and extravagance throughout the state, for example, a local government chairman in Rivers State bought one thousand tickets for the World cup from the local government budget. I admire his choice of events if little else. There are great voids in government service delivery and regrettably anger, frustration (and criminality) amongst other factors are fuelling violence in the Niger Delta, this is a subject for another day!