A civil society election observation organisation in Nigeria, under the auspices of the Transition Monitoring Group (TMG), on Friday, launched a compendium of campaign promises by leading presidential candidates in the 2023 February 25 election.
The TMG’s Chairman, Auwal Rafsanjani, in his remark during the launch in Abuja, said the compendium was unveiled in order to hold political office holders accountable.
Rafsanjani explained that the essence of the exercise was to present a tool that can be used to remind elected leaders and hold them to account on their own words, being their campaign promises.
He said it was disheartening that while citizens are suffering and lacking basic social amenities, politicians are going with billions of naira in the name of severance package, which he said have continued to cause instability in the polity.
He therefore said that the group would not keep quiet until Nigerian democracy is practisrd correctly, adding that the TMG would not continue to watch and allow unfairness and injustice thrive in the country.
“It is with great pleasure that I welcome you all to this short but very important occasion of the Launch of a Compendium of Campaign Promises by leading presidential candidates in the just concluded 2023 election. Permit me to also apologise for my inability to be with you physically today.
“The importance of today’s occasion underscores the core vision of the current Board of Transition Monitoring Group (TMG).
“As the foremost election observation and monitoring group in Nigeria, TMG cannot afford to fold its arm till every election cycle to be active in Nigeria’s quest for consolidated democracy. Hence, the vision is to see TMG move beyond election observation to governance monitoring.
“As we all know, citizens’ participation is at the heart of governance monitoring. However, citizens can only participate in governance to the extent of information at their disposal.
“This means that, organisations like ours must take active steps in ensuring that citizens are adequately informed, to enable them to use the information to hold government to account,” he said.
Rafsanjani said it is in realising the new vision and contributing its quota to making information available to citizens as a tool to hold government to account that TMG under the auspices of the SCALE project with support from the American people began documentation of the campaign promises of leading presidential aspirants as soon as the campaign period began.
“The objective of the exercise is quite simple; often times, we have seen politicians outrightly deny promises they made after they have been elected to office, or just simply turn a blind eye to promises made especially when no one seems to hold them to account on those promises.
“Also, we have seen citizens quickly forget about the promises made if they are not documented. Hence, TMG has documented promises from the 2023 election with the hope of presenting a tool that can be used to remind elected leaders and hold them to account on their own words.”
He added that while the documentation has only streamlined to the leading four candidates at the presidential level, as well as streamlined the areas of focus to critical areas of development that include the economy, health, education, security, anti-corruption and others, he said TMG hoped to subsequently expand the scope of this exercise to the subnational level where governance accountability and citizens participation is at a critical low.
“We adopted a straightforward methodology to documenting these promises, and this include desk reviews, constant monitoring of appearances of the candidates in different media and forum.
“More importantly we combed through the manifestos of the candidates which as far as we are concerned remain the most binding documents to the aspirants.
“Though a president has emerged from the electioneering process and other candidates are in court contesting the outcome of the election, however it plays out, this publication will serve as critical tool to holding the president of the Federal Republic of Nigeria to account on his own promises.
“We reserve special commendation to the SCALE Project of the Palladium Group and the United State Agency for International Development (USAID) for finding this effort worthy of their support and for supporting the process leading up to the documentation of this compendium.
“We hope that when the published copies of the compendium are disseminated to you, you will also play your role in further disseminating as widely as possible,” he said.
The Vice Chair, TMG, Mrs Miriam Menkiti; members of the Board of TMG,, members of TMG, representatives of the SCALE Project, partners from the Civil Society, Secretariat Staff of TMG, were among participants at the launch.
