Accountability expert and E-government lecturer, Malcolm Oseahon, has opined that Information and communication technologies (ICT) is pivotal to actualising the eight points agenda of President Bola Tinubu.
Oseahon spoke against the backdrop of calls for the scrapping/unbundling of the Federal Ministry of Humanitarian Affairs and Poverty Alleviation (FMHAPA) during an interview on Arise TV.
He opined that the Ministry can fulfill its mandate if it is made a coordinating Ministry and not an implementing or executing ministry.
Oseahon explained that the ministry should with the aid of 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.
The South Korean-trained expert highlighted how the electronic government will naturally make the Ministry and every other Ministry, Department, and Agency accountable to both the government of the day and the citizens it was created to serve.
He said: “The Federal Government has to be more proactive in ensuring that whatever it has promised to the people gets to the people; they should pay cardinal attention to what he termed the four pillars of government interactions, which include:
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o The Government to Citizens (G2C)
o The Government to Government (G2G)
o The Government to Business (G2B)
o The Government to Employees (G2E)
“These pillars of government interactions will give the administration the needed direction in achieving resolute gains in the fight against poverty.
“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.
“A people’s centric dashboard must be created to track and manage;
o The authenticity of the National Social Register
o Cash and non-cash palliative distribution,
o Healthcare services,
o Disbursement of financial aid,
o Proportion of men, women, and children progression out of poverty and,
o Loan disbursement and recovery.
o Student loan”
He noted that the creation of the 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”. Oseahon concluded.
