A civil society organization, Resource Center for Human & Civic Education (CHRICED) has stressed that journalists and Civil Society Organizations CSOs must put effort into monitoring constituency projects to check corrupt practices.
The Executive Director of CHRICED, Comrade Dr. Ibrahim Zikirullahi, said this in a Media and CSOs training organized by CHRICED tagged, Fostering Transparency and Accountability In Constituency Project Service Delivery in Kano.
The federal government introduced the Constituency Project in 1999 to bring needed infrastructural development to the grassroots.
Constituency funds are allocated to each of the serving 109 senators and 360 representatives from the 36 states and the Federal Capital Territory yearly.
Executing ministries implement projects worth about N200 million on behalf of each senator yearly and half that amount per representative.
Every year, about N100 billion from the national budget goes into constituency projects.
Unfortunately, constituency projects have become legislators' conduits for embezzling public funds in collaboration with top ministry officials.
However, a project can be abandoned or not started because the supervising ministry failed to release the funds due to bureaucratic processes.
Between January 2020 and June 2021, about 288 of 1439 constituency projects awarded were never started. They were valued at N2.1 billion.
Twenty-one others were abandoned, according to a 2022 report by BudgIT, a local social advocacy group.
These challenges, including a lack of transparency and accountability, have left several communities underdeveloped in Kano State.
CHRICED launched a bold anti-corruption campaign tagged “to track some abandoned projects in Kano State” to tackle this challenge.
The project was a continuation of another project tagged: Promotion of Community Driven Anti-Corruption Initiatives in Kano it launched in January 2021 to address the lack of accountability in the execution of constituency projects.
According to CHRICED, the project also addresses low citizen morale, weak community organizing capacity, bureaucratic structures, and general apathy fueling corruption in delivering key rural infrastructure to the grassroots through these projects.
It said the training was necessary to equip voice actors with the relevant knowledge and skills to promote transparency and accountability in planning and implementing constituency projects in Kano.
CHRICED also said one of the most strategic ways of fighting corruption was to equip voice actors to track abandoned and substandard projects and hold public officeholders accountable.
Speaking at the training, Comrade Dr. Zikirullahi stressed the level of corruption in constituency projects, just as he said, “CHRICED has trained over 300 journalists, CSOs, and community actors on how to hold public office holders accountable.”
He said every kobo allocated to both state and federal levels should be well utilized to deliver dividends of democracy.
"More efforts needed to be put in service delivery, to see that at community levels politicians should not be able to squander our money,” he added.
Aqibu Hamisu from the Centre for Awareness on Justice and Accountability (CAJA) identified “mismanagement, misappropriation, and lack of consultation constituent" as some of the challenges in project execution.
During his presentation, Aqibu revealed that “Lawmakers use their self-founded companies to bid for contracts against the spellings of the Public Procurement Act and divert the funds.”
“Lawmakers also connive with officials at the supervising ministries to award contracts to non-existent contractors," he said.
Aqibu, who presented a paper titled: The Role of CBOs and CSOs in Monitoring Constituency Projects Implementation buttresses that journalists and CSOs must hold politicians accountable to halt corrupt practices.
