CODE urges legislators to consider community needs in constituency projects

CODE urges legislators to consider community needs in constituency projects

By: Our Correspondent

A group under the auspices of Connected Development (CODE) has urged member of the National Assembly to put into consideration the need of communities before allocating zonal constituency project to them to ensure that their needs met.

CODE’s team-lead in the state, Mr. Abubakar Mohammed, disclosed this during a “Deepening Citizens’ Interest in Government Spending and Addressing Accompanying Corrupt Practices (DeSPAAC). ” Year  3 Agenda training for Ministry, Department  and Agencies in Kaduna state yesterday.

According to him, the developmental projects which spread across Health, Education, Agriculture, Empowerment and Grants should be aimed towards improving the lives of the citizens.

“As we all know N100 billion has been budgeted yearly for constituency project and legislators are in charge of executing projects while MDAs discharge the project to communities.

“A lot needs to be done around information sharing because a huge amount of money being put in place to execute this project.

“Advocacy needs to be done, because a lot of people don’t know about the constituency, some think lawmakers use their personal money to execute the project not knowing it’s task payers money”, he said.

Muhammad explained that the organization had tracked 118 projects in the 23 local government area of the state worth 6.4 billion Naira from 2021 to 2022.

He added that CODE had  partnered the Independent Corrupt Practices Commission (ICPC) to report any case of abandoned project or lapses from the contractor.

Speaking earlier, Mr. Yusuf Goje, of head of governance and advocacy, Coalition of Association for Leadership, Peace, Empowerment and Development (CALPED) who spoke on Monitoring and Evaluation said proper N&E helps government to measure achievement or set backs in a given project as well as check if the money allocated was used in the rightly.

Goje explained that the Monitoring and Evaluation will be able to track where monies  allocated for a project went, how it is utilized and how it impacted the lives of ordinary citizens of the state.
Mahmud Idris, a participant from the Planning and Budget Commission said he had learned the importance of results based monitoring and evaluation processes.

He added that as a monitoring and evaluation officer, he would pay more attention to result of the product rather than completion of the project alone.
CODE is supported by the MacArthur Foundation on Deepening Citizens Interest in Government Spending and Addressing the Accompanying Corrupt Practices (DeSPAAC) in Kaduna state.