The Executive Director of the Society for Democratic Initiative SDI, Emmanuel Saffa Abdulai yesterday disclosed in a press briefing that his organization is working assiduously to ensure transparency in Local Government of this country.
He said they received a grant of seventy eight thousand (78,000) British pounds from DFID to carry out the project which they started last year and it will be in all the Districts around the country.
The Executive Director stated that they will have to train monitors to operate at the Districts level in monitoring Local Government officials in discharging their duties.
He maintained that the objectives of the project is to promote transparency, accountability and ensure that the Legislative framework are well known by the general public and are used to enhance public service delivery.
“The purpose of any Freedom of Information Law is to enhance transparency and accountability, allow the people to participate in governance, provide checks on the excesses of public officials, entrench democracy by allowing a two sided governance mechanism in which the people impute into governance policy and allow the people to know their rights,” he said.
“The project will help fund activities on coalition building on issues around transparency and accountability and support and strengthen the coalition with materials and logistical support to be able to monitor the compliance of the Transparency Laws”, Emmanuel Saffa Abdulai said.
The Executive Director further disclosed that last year, SDI developed a concept on how they would use the concept of Freedom of Information to hold Local Government accountable. As they are talking about the fight against corruption in the country there is no way for a government to perform well when the Local Councils are not functioning properly.
He also cited section 107 and 108 of the Local Government Act which provides that all public documents held by Local Councils including receipts of income and expenditure are public documents. It also mandated Local Councils to publish their financial statements at the end of every month on notice boards for easy access by citizens, adding that this provision goes hand in hand with the Freedom of Information concept which SDI has been promoting.
According to him, during and at the end of the project, the outcome will be assessed based on the categorization of tangibles such as coalition building which indicate the success of the strand of the project, adding that the establishment of the regional coalition will also indicate the level of networking that the project has achieved as they will produce handbooks, T-shirts, book on FOI and Local government.
“Apart from all what I have said, we are also going to look at the Local Government Act by trying to analyze and simplify so that members of the public can understand its contents and issues as not everyone understand the law and at the end we will conduct a test to know whether Local Government officials are working with the Laws,” said Abdulai.
By Alhaji M. Kamara
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