Agora Policy delivers digital information for informed public oversight
Last Thursday in Abuja, policymakers and members of the civil society gathered for the unveiling of two critical platforms by Agora Policy: The ‘Policy Registry’ and the ‘Local Governance Accountability (LGA) portal’. The digital platforms, developed with support from MacArthur Foundation, are geared towards giving the Nigerian public relevant tools to become more active players in the policy space themselves and to hold policymakers to account.
While we commend Agora Policy for the initiative, we must remind the public that Nigeria’s governance deficit is not solely a product of bad leadership. It is also a product of bad information–the kind of structural opacity that makes it nearly impossible for citizens to know what their governments are doing, the amount of money each tier generates both from Federation Account Allocation Committee (FAAC) and Internally Generated Revenues (IGR) and who is responsible for what.
The two portals (accessible at www.lgaportal.org and www.policyregistry.org) represent a serious attempt to shift the terms of civic engagement in Nigeria. Together, they address different layers of the same problem: that public information, which should be freely accessible, has historically been scattered, gatekept, or simply unavailable. The LGA Portal is the more urgent of the two, and for good reason. This is the tier of government responsible for primary healthcare, basic education, local infrastructure, sanitation, and rural development, but it has long operated without any meaningful public oversight. And it remains the least effective.
