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The Nigeria Accountability Summit focuses on six domains including social, financial, political, administrative, ethical, and legal accountability systems in Nigeria. The Summit brings together field experts and policy makers to connect these accountability domains with sectoral challenges impeding sustainable development and identify policy solutions that address these challenges.
Social accountability strategies and tools help empower ordinary citizens to exercise their inherent rights and to hold governments accountable for the use of public funds and how they exercise authority. The Nigeria Accountability Summit seeks to underscore current limitations to enhancing social accountability as a way to affirm and make operational the direct accountability relationship between citizens and the State. This aspect of the Summit examines social accountability practices (including for example participatory public policy, participatory budgeting, participatory auditing, public expenditure tracking and citizen monitoring and evaluation of public services) as an approach to enhancing government accountability and transparency toward effective service delivery.
The Summit reviews the establishment of the pattern of control over the receipts and expenditures that permits a determination that public monies have been used for public purposes. The Summit delves into understanding how public finance management systems operational at national and subnational level have helped to deliver public goods, what challenges still exist and ideas to fortify existing systems.
The Summit examines the practice of improving overall personal and organizational performance by developing and promoting responsible tools and professional expertise and by advocating an effective enabling environment for people and organizations to embrace a culture of sustainable development. This phase of the Summit is expected to identify what ethical considerations exist and are needed to improve public administration in Nigeria.
Political accountability is when a politician makes choices on behalf of the people, and the people have the ability to reward or sanction the politician. The accountability of civil servants and politicians to the public and to legislative bodies is crucial to the development of democracy. The political office holder of any rank should be accountable to the electorate (that is, the people) he or she has been elected to serve and the people should be made to see that their votes did not only count but that those elected are accounting for the mandate given to them. The Nigeria Accountability Summit considers Nigeria’s democratic journey in the 4th Republic and explores to what degree political accountability has been achieved, what gaps currently exist and what reforms are required to strengthen political accountability at national and subnational level.
Internal rules and norms as well as some independent institutions are mechanisms to hold civil servants within the administration of government accountable. Within a department or ministry, first, behavior is bound by rules and regulations; Secondly, civil servants are subordinates in a hierarchy and accountable to superiors. Nevertheless, there are independent watchdog units to scrutinize and hold departments accountable; legitimacy of these institutions is built upon their independence as it avoids any conflict of interest. The Summit explores what institutions of government are responsible for ensuring administrative accountability, to what extent this has been achieved and what necessary changes/reforms are required to improve administrative accountability within government agencies at national and subnational levels.
Legal accountability is usually enforced through the Courts and tribunals and other quasi-judicial institutions. In developed countries of the world, they ensure that everyone whose conduct is questionable in one form or the other, is subjected to legal accountability regardless of the person’s social or political status in society. The Nigeria Accountability Summit examines the significance of Nigeria’s judicial or quasi-judicial systems to achieving legal accountability, how much of legal accountability has been achieved so far and what reforms are required to enhance existing systems and institutions for improved legal accountability.