By Nana Musa
The Minister of State, Finance, Budget and National Planning, Prince Clement Agba has called for urged new approach in implementation of second phase of the National Action Plan (NAP II).
Agba made the call on Tuesday in Abuja at the 2021 Open Government Partnership (OGP) Week for Nigeria OGP National Steering Committee on interactive dialogue with all the Thematic Working Group Co-Chairs.
He urged all government partners in OGP in Nigeria to work hard towards achieving the set goals and objectives of NAP for accelerated progress on OGP.
The minister said the Independent Reporting Mechanism (IRM) of the OGP published a review of the implementation of the first phase of National Action Plan (NAP l) with rich recommendations that the committee needed to reflect on.
The IRM review of NAP I found that Nigeria substantially implemented three out of 14 commitments in the action plan.
Nigeria, notably advanced commitments in the areas of open budget, ease of doing business and reviewing open government laws.
Nine commitments saw limited implementation, two of these were not started during the implementation period.
The two relate to information-sharing among anti-corruption agencies and building technology for citizen engagement and have been carried over to the next action plan.
For some of the commitments, the details of IRM findings and recommendations are damning and calls for deep reflection from all of us, the minister said.
Agba said the committee must immediately get to the work of implementing the second action plan for better outcomes, seeing that we have about one year left of our implementation cycle.
We cannot use the pandemic as an excuse, especially as the action plan has been extended by one year, he said.
The minister suggested some new approaches including early warning signs of the possibility of not fully implementing any commitment and measure impact of the work by working closely with the M