Why FG must consider e-governance to boost accountability, others—Expert

By Ugwu Paul

In a bid to enhance transparency and accountability in governance, an accountability expert, and e-government lecturer at the E-government Training Institute, Malcolm Oseahon, has stressed the importance of the Federal Government (FG) adopting e-governance practices.

The expert highlighted that e-governance would streamline processes, increase efficiency, and reduce corruption, ultimately benefiting the entire nation.

As reported by www.currenttimesng.com, e-governance is the utilization of information and communication technologies (ICT) to transform government operations and services, thereby creating an enabling environment for efficient governance.

He made the call in a statement made available to Vanguard, on Monday, in Abuja.

Citing the case of the Humanitarian and Poverty Alleviation Ministry, Oseahon, opined that ICT is the way out of the recent debacle not just in the Humanitarian Ministry but in ensuring that the eight points Agenda of President Bola Ahmed Tinubu, is attained in a short while.

He opined that the Ministry can fulfill its mandate if it is made a coordinating Ministry and not an implementing or executing ministry.

He said the ministry should, with the aid of Information and Communications Technology, ICT, focus solely on coordinating, supervising and regulating government interventions across the 747 local government, 36 states and FCT, rather than interfering with the finance and execution of actual projects except when it is unavoidable.

He said the government should pay cardinal attention to what he termed the four pillars of government interactions, which are “The Government to citizens (G2C); The Government to Government (); The Government to Business (G2B); The Government to Employees (G2E)”

He added that the aforementioned pillars of government interactions will give the administration the needed direction in achieving resolute gains in the fight against multidimensional poverty.

The e-government lecturer believes the best way to see multidimensional poverty should be through the eyes of the protagonist; multidimensional poverty in simple term is peoples lived experiences. These people are considered the experts in poverty, the men, women and children living in those conditions. "Government has to find a way to be in the lives of these people daily, to be able to practically lift them out of poverty and ICT as an enabler for government service is the only way". He submitted.

He maintained that FMHAPA should more or less serve as a coordinating body and not in all cases be implemented, adding that a people’s centric dashboard must be created to track and manage the authenticity of the national social register, cash and noncash palliatives, student loan, among others.

Speaking further, he believes the creation of this dashboard will be the game changer for this administration and will heal the ailing Ministry of the trust deficit it is currently suffering from.

“Creating this dashboard will promote transparency and accountability to the point that individuals and nongovernmental institutions will be willing to contribute their funds to this novel project that the world will gladly benchmark in their quest to meet up with global best practices”, he said.