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Workshop calls
for FOI Centers at Local Government Councils
Participants at a Freedom of Information workshop for grassroots
organizations have called for Local Information Centers to be established
at
Local Government levels to ensure effective implementation when the
Freedom of Information Bill is eventually passed into law.
They also suggested that community based organisations (CBOs) should play
a central role in the effective implementation of the proposed law by building
an efficient network to act as link between rural communities and the
information centers. It is only in this way, they said, that the law can
be effectively enforced.
About 40 participants drawn from various grassroots and community based
organizations gathered at Gombe Jewel Hotel, Kaduna on December 19, for
the FOI enlightenment campaign aimed at broadening the constituency for
support for the Bill.
The workshop, the third in the series of grassroots workshops on freedom
of information, was organized by the Media Rights Agenda (MRA), in
collaboration with Connecting Gender for Development (COGEN), with support
from the European Union (EU).
Organizations represented at the one-day workshop include: Center for
Children and Women Intervention Programme, Kabyayang Widows Association,
Mayatti Allah, Naomi Widows Group, Mother Care Forum, Women Development
Organisation, Society for the Restoration of Human Dignity, Aid Foundation
Barnawa, Kawo Women Development Association, Kawo Youth Association, Media
and Development Project, ALFACARI Organisation, Poverty Alleviation
Development Center, Adolescent and Youth Awareness Team, STD/AIDS
Awareness and Prevention, Federation of Moslem Women, Kaduna branch, and
Abantu for Development.
Other organizations are: Northern Youth Consultative Forum, Helping Hand
Network, Rural Women and Youth Empowerment Programme, Children Information
Network, Reube Fulbe Development Association, Himma Dramatic Club,
Association for Adolescent Reproductive Health Action, Love and Compassion
Ministry, and Christian Association of Nigeria.
In his opening remarks, Mr. Tive Denedo, the Campaigns Director of Media
Rights Agenda and coordinator of the workshop, told participants that the
journey towards making Nigeria a better place had taken a huge step
forward with the entrance of the Freedom of Information Bill into the
National Assembly in 1999. He said the debate is getting more robust by
the day and that the era of secrecy and arbitrariness in government will
soon be over.
Also speaking on the importance of the Bill, Ms Ngukwase Surma, the
Executive Director of Connecting Gender for Development, described the
Bill as a mechanism that will allow the voice of the average Nigerians to
be heard and also afford them the rare and unique opportunity of
contributing to the governance process.
She said: “It is like giving you a chance to participate in the Board
meetings of the Kaduna Polytechnic. It will be a wonderful experience.”
Participants demonstrated their enthusiasm for the Freedom of Information
Bill by spending their breaks periods sending text messages on their
mobile phones to Senators, urging them to support passage of the Bill,
which was to come up for the third reading at the Senate the next day.
The participants suggested that when the Bill is passed, it should use the
bottom-up approach to avoid the plague of non-implementation which has
befallen a lot of other laws due to concentration of all efforts at the
Federal level to the neglect of the grassroots.
They also resolved that Local Council offices should be the circulation
point for the law when translated into local languages. They premised this
resolution on the general belief among them that the National Human Rights
Commission, the proposed administrative body for the implementation of the
law, could not be effective if it was solely responsible for getting the
law across the federation to all stakeholders.
Participants at a similar workshop for grassroots and community-based
organizations in the Niger-Delta region held in Port Harcourt on December
5, 2005, had called for the translation of the proposed law into local
languages to make it more accessible to rural dwellers.
The Kaduna workshop participants suggested that CBOs be empowered to get
the rural people to embrace the message of legal access to information
held by government and called for the use of local media of communication
within rural communities to spread the message of the proposed law.
This, they said, will ensure that information which will play a vital role
in the lives of the people get to them on time instead of relying on the
mass media which are currently too elitist in structure and hardly get
information to rural communities.
The participants were optimistic that the impact of the Freedom of
Information bill would be felt most in the years ahead and also
recommended that youths be empowered through awareness campaigns to imbibe
the principles of democracy and the content of the law.
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