By Abdulrasheed Akogun
The Kwara State Governor, Abdulrahman Abdulrazaq has allege the Elite Network for Sustainable Development (Enetsud), of being used by the opposition elements in the State to attack his government.
It would be recalled Enetsud had went into a Social Audit arrangement with the Governor that sees the civil society organization auditing government projects, aimed at ascertaining strict adherence to the Bill of Quantity and ensuring quality job is delivered.
It would further be recalled that Enetsud had few weeks back won a landmark judgement against the Kwara State Government over the appointment of Transition Implementation Committee (TIC), to man the affairs of the local governments as against the conduct of elections as proscribed by the constitution.
The Governor made this disclosure while responding question bordering on transparency in an interview with Thisday Newspaper, published today, October 17th, stressing that the government isn’t toying with transparency.
He said “Part of our transparency issue is we looked at Savannah Institute in our Abuja. Savannah Institute was set up by the present Chief of Staff to the president. And he resigned from there to join the President. We told Savannah to look at civil service structure and advise us on governance.
“They came, went through their processes and said, the best thing to do is to embrace this culture where the community and the people can have access to government projects. If you have a four kilometer road, the community should be able to measure it and be sure that the contractor is putting four kilometres. If it is two kilometres, the community should be able to do that. We embraced it.
“The first step was to invite a CSO to join us. We took all our files and gave it to them. From tender documents to payments, there is nothing to hide. But we’ve noticed that what the opposition is doing now is to use the CSOs to attack us, because they know that they cannot attack us because they don’t have the locus to attack us.
“So, they are attacking the government on water, what did you do on infrastructure? What did you do? So the more CSOs we open up to, the more attacks we get from them.
“It’s making us to say, fine. Instead of dealing with CSOs, let’s deal with communities. Let communities take over their projects and inspect their projects. It’d be nice to become Number One on the transparency index, but it’s a tough challenge” he stressed.
