By Peter Ayoade
An NGO, Future Minds Development Initiative (FMDI), has called on the three tiers of government to collaborate to ensure accountability in the implementation of rural community projects to achieve national growth.
Mogaji Tunde Ali, Executive Director of FMDI, made the call while addressing the journalists on Saturday in Ibadan.
According to him, Accountable Nigeria Initiative is aimed to empower the people towards becoming better self-assessing individuals and dedicated citizens for the society. It stands to proffer solution to the inherent issues identified in the Nigerian society through a means that allows active participation of a typical Nigerian citizen to bring about transparency to every actions and inactions, right to information (citizen empowerment), improvement in the quality of life of citizens, and a society that unites for unimpeded growth and development.
Dr. Tunde stated that the call became imperative because of the need for citizens to hold their leaders accountable and to achieve meaningful community development.
According to him, the vision of every community resident is to be empowered with requisite information as a tool for holding his or her government accountable through FMDI.
“If there is no accountability, then democracy cannot work effectively, we want people to always lend their voice to promote accountability and ensure things work perfectly in their community.
“FMDI tries to answer questions about where funds are coming from, where they are going to and most importantly, to know how judiciously funds are being utilised at grass roots.
“This will not only strengthen Nigeria’s democracy, but also help citizens focus attention on issues that can bring about service delivery in rural communities during electoral processes.
“Lack of accountability is what causes corruption and accountability is important and must be supported toward making the poor access improved services in public institutions.”
He urged the people to always take community service work serious in order to achieve the set target.
He further added that the essence of accountability was to enable the poor access quality services by government as a matter of right they deserve.
“We must try to imbibe accountability and integrity as culture; we are not blaming anybody in government, all we are saying is every project should be implemented transparently”, Mogaji submitted.
