Executive Director of Media Rights Agenda (MRA) Mr. Edetaen Ojo, has proposed a comprehensive review of the country’s current OGP National Action Plan (NAP II) to make it relevant to the prevailing governance realities and outlined proposals for its effective implementation.
Asked if the OGP Nigeria NAPII was designed with sufficient flexibility for it to respond to the present circumstances, Mr. Ojo said it was not, explaining that at the time of its creation, which began early in 2019 and ended with the validated plan in September 2019, “nobody anticipated a situation such as the one we are in now.”
“Most of us have never experienced anything like this in our life times. So there is really no way anyone could have envisaged this possibility and prepared for such an eventuality in the design of the NAP II by making allowances for any such occurrence. The closest any of us saw was the impact of the 2019 elections on certain aspects of the OGP in Nigeria. However, after the elections early in 2019 and the political transition by the middle of that year, no significant elections were expected to take place at any time from the beginning of 2020 until the end of 2021. So it really did not occur to anyone that there was a need to build safeguards in NAP II to respond to this sort of situation,” he observed.
Mr. Ojo, who is the former Co-Chair of the Open Government Partnership (OGP) in Nigeria and currently a member of the National Steering Committee (NSC) of OGP Nigeria, made the proposal at a webinar on “Implementing OGP NAP II in Nigeria in the Face of COVID-19”, organized by the Secretariat of Open Alliance, a network of civil society organizations seeking to promote good governance in Nigeria. The webinar took place on April 20, 2020.
The MRA director suggested that the OGP Nigeria community should undertake a thorough review of the activities proposed in NAP II to determine which of them might require some tweaking and how they might be refocused to ensure that they remain relevant for the current circumstances.
He remarked that in some cases, no modifications in the activities may actually be required as the challenge may be how to implement them under the current circumstances or in the immediate post-COVID-19 period and that in such situations, what would be needed would be other approaches to the implementation of those activities, such as taking advantage of technologies that will enable people to work remotely.
Mr, Ojo stressed that the current period provides both the necessity as well as an opportunity to undertake such a thorough review of NAP II.
On what strategy or approach the NSC can put in place to ensure that the implementation of NAP II is not negatively affected by the impact of COVID-19, Mr. Ojo recalled that the OGP CEO, Mr. Sanjay Pradhan, first sounded the alarm about the COVID-19 situation ravaging the world in his March 14, 2020 message to the OGP community, adding that at that time, Mr. Pradhan had advised member countries “to delay any planned OGP events to later in the year or, if possible, switch to virtual meetings