The Executive Director of Yiaga Africa, Samson Itodo, has described the establishment of People’s Assembly by the organisation as a democratic tool to bridge the trust gap between elected political office holders and people at the grassroots.
Itodo stated this while speaking with the News Agency of Nigeria on Sunday in Abuja.
“We launched the People’s Assembly initiative to promote civic participation in order to foster dialogue among the citizens, groups and local government executives,” he said.
Itodo said that his organisation came up with the initiative as a major stakeholder in the political policy development process.
He said that Yiaga Africa had worked with the national assembly on several legislations like the Electoral Act and the constitution review.
“We also worked with the citizens, Independent National Electoral Commission and others to sanitise the electoral process.
“We equally beamed searchlight on the activities of government to ensure that they are in consonance with the provisions of our laws, but more importantly, that citizens are able to interface with their legislators.
“People’s Assembly has been established in 12 states where we work with the local government officials and people,” he said.
Itodo said that this intervention had really paid off, as local government councils had taken actions to solve some of the problems being faced by the people.
“It is about effective service delivery and the initiative has helped the people to identify the real projects they need and not for the politicians to give them what they think they need.
“We have to strengthen local governance because that’s where people feel democracy the most and this was the rationale behind the initiative,’’ he said.
The executive director said that Yiaga Africa had yet to establish the initiative in all the 36 states of the federation because of financial constraints, amongst other impediments.
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“We started the experiment with two states – Sokoto and Lagos; now we have scaled it to 12 states, and with support from open society foundations, we hope that we will be able to expand to more states,” he said.
According to him, democracy would make no sense if people cannot get what they want and decisions that are at variance with their desires are being taken.
Itodo said that the assembly was structured to ensure that a follow-up mechanism was in place to ensure that once resolution had been reached, they would be implemented.
“If this initiative is entrenched and people become part of governance process, relating with their representatives will make more impact,” he said.
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