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The two-day training for CBOs, FBOs, CSOs, and the organized private sector, by Anti-Corruption Academy of Nigeria (ACAN) was one forum that brought together 58 organisations covering wider spectrum of our society. The training on strategies for implementation of National Ethics and Integrity Policy (NEIP) is driving home the message of norm and behaviourial change in the fight against corruption. The Provost of ACAN, Professor Olatunde Babawale spoke to Apex News Exclusive on his expectations on the collective action, in the policy implementation process. Excerpts:
By Samuel Torlumun, Anthony Maliki, Abuja
What are your expectations after this successful training?
My expectation from this particular training programme is that groups that have been invited cutting across the civil societies, the traditional institutions, religious institutions are going to imbibe what they have learnt and adapt the strategies we have recommended collectively to their own situations in their various organizations, then use this training to cascade trainings in their organization to others, so that we can have the idea of popularizing the implementation of National Ethics and Integrity Policy, across the broad spectrum of our society. My second expectation which is already been realized is to have some of these organizations, coming up with ideas for partnership with us, so that we can further deepen our training efforts and then cover areas that have not been covered. For example, there are suggestions from the floor, that maybe we should begin to extend this to editors of media houses. That is a fantastic idea because they are going to be the people that will help us spread this gospel.
Another important area is the social media. How are you going to be dealing with this?
Indeed, when I made reference to having indications that we are going to partner with editors, its actually the person who spoke about the social media, that expressed that interest, and we will begin to work on it. We are going to sit down together to work out the modalities. What I expect is that, the organization of social media editors and proprietors will meet with us, and discuss with their members to get this done. This is because we believe that social media is a powerful medium for publicizing this idea that we talked about. That is where you have most of our youths today, and that is the instrument they use to relate to themselves. And we feel that the social media can be more useful than the traditional media because, it can reach a wider coverage of people and that will make our message to go as far as we expect it to go.
What projection or percentage are you looking at to cover enough ground, to publicize this policy?
My hope and prayer will be that we get to the large segment of the population, but I don’t have the power of prophesy to know the percentage that we will be covering. But, I think we have started a process that is meant to bring up what we called collective action. We are expecting that these organizations will link up with their own audience, or constituencies. Those constituencies represent the significant segment of our population. As many of our facilitators have said, this project is not a hundred metres dash; it is a marathon, because changing people’s mindset, attitude and behavior is a long term process. It is not a project you start and complete just like that, so we believe that once this message get to the grassroots through these organizations over a period of time, we will begin to notice changes, especially if we are able to penetrate the youth segment.
How many groups have you invited, and how many are in attendance in this training?
We invited 60 and we have 58 here in attendance. We selected them accordingly; whether they are Faith-Based Organizations, Community-Based Organizations, Civil Society Organizations and Organized Private Sector. We also have individuals who are representing religious institutions, that is why we have an Imam here. We also have those who are representing the traditional institution, that is why we have the Emir of Keffi here.
We have spoken to a good number of these groups who have expressed optismism that with the strategy of inclusion ACAN-ICPC has adopted, NEIP will be a huge success.What are your follow up measures or plans to ensure this message is massively domesticated?
It is a continuous process, as I told you we didn’t intent that this will be a one-stop affair. We didn’t intent that this will be a hundred metres dash. We know it is going to be a long process, and we are providing within this period opportunity for us to do some assessments of the impact this programme has had on the society. There is an inbuilt system, we are going to carry out a research. In fact, we do periodic research in ACAN about the attitude of people to politics. In my opening remarks I said part of the things we discovered in our research is that, virtually every Nigerian believes in one religion or the other. That is something that is common to us. Those Nigerians who would say I don’t believe in anything are very few. They maybe Christians or Muslims or those worshipping traditional gods, but the believe in a particular religion. We are bound to do more research to be able to assess, both in qualitative and quantitative terms what this has achieved. And of course I also know because ICPC is now trying to adopt another approach to fighting corruption, as the Chairman said in his opening remarks that, they have found out that there are limitations with the Law and Order system, that is why they are now embracing the behavior change approach. It makes the job of the commission easier, because if you look at what has happened to us over the years; the government that we have had in the last eight years is one of those that have mostly popularized its commitment to war on corruption. So much as it has tried, the thing still persist. We should now ask ourselves why? And one of the answers we have given is that there is a need to complement that approach with another. So it will only be incumbent on ACAN and the ICPC to see whether this new approach is achieving results. It’s only natural, otherwise it will be a wasted effort. And don’t forget the MacArthur Foundation that is sponsoring it is only interested in having positive outcomes, not just pumping money into it and at the end of the day having nothing to show for it.
