A civil society organisation (CSO) has advocated the use of constructive engagement in ensuring that funds appropriated in government budgets for the execution of capital projects are properly deployed.

A Senior Economist/Executive Director of Citizens for Justice, Employment and Transparency (C-JET), Mr. Victor Anyanwu, made this call during a fiscal responsibility session for the South South geo-political zone which held at Taland Place, D-Line, Port Harcourt, last Monday.

He said that while governments may often mean well for the citizenry in their policies and programmes, the exigencies, diversities and enormity of competing demands can make the outcomes from actual operations of governance fall short of the people’s expectations.

“Civil society organizations have a responsibility to both anticipate and highlight such underperformances by engaging the officials, ministries and agencies of governments in collaborative relations on how to minimize the incidence of such systemic limitations.

“Improvements in service delivery and people’s welfare should be an overriding consideration in such engagements,” he added.

Anyanwu decried the attitude of public servants who are often unwilling to allow for external accountability, as most of them detest any monitoring or measurement of their activities and performances.

He urged governments, especially those of the South South states, to always post their yearly budgets on the Internet for easier accessibility rather than the present system of asking any intending users to apply for copies of such public documents.

Speaking earlier, the Lead Director of Citizens Welfare Platform (CWP) and one of the main organisers of the workshop, Barrister Eze Onyekpere, had identified corruption and fiscal rascality by politicians as reasons for the high incidence of tax avoidance among Nigerians.

He cited the case of Ghana with its growing economy and sound infrastructure, but whose annual budget is hardly up to the sum of Lagos and Rivers States’ budgets.

Onyekpere attributed Ghana’s success to fiscal discipline on the part of public office holders and active participation of the citizens in monitoring the budget implementation process.

According to him, Nigeria has enough resources to achieve all the targets she had been setting for herself prior to 2000, including the UN’s Millennium Development Goals by 2015, if only the leadership will exercise some restraint in boom bursts and other wasteful expenditures.

Ibelema Jumbo