Ene Obi is the country director, ActionAid Nigeria, a non-governmental organisation (NGO) involved in the campaign towards the eradication of poverty and working to ensure the dignity of life of Nigerians. In this interview, she spoke with ANIEFIOK UDONQUAK on the sidelines of a-three day conference in Uyo, the Akwa Ibom State capital. Excerpts:
What is the main focus of ActionAid?
We are anti-poverty organisation and our work is to ensure the life of dignity for every Nigerian and so, we use human right approach to do everything that we do, believing that all humans are equal. That is according to the universal declaration of human and people rights that is doctored into our own Constitution and in fighting to eradicate poverty; we realise that corruption is one of the major blocks, blocking every avenue. Because you have for example, the local government administration, the closest governance to the people and that is where you have corruption. You can see that we do not even have the system. We have the normal structure-the civil service system, but do you have the funding system that condones that? The management system, the government as an organisation, because government is a tool and governance is a process of administering the government. But when you don’t have the leadership, the leadership of the local government comes in as a result of getting the local chairmen by the ruling class or the governor who appoints the caretaker committee and so on and so forth, and there are no elections there. So, where do the people really learn from? The process of governance needs to go to the lowest level. The smallest unit is the family and from the family you are going into the society. At the local government level, that is where people are dying silently. And we have rising cases of deaths and we need to tackle that at this level. And we say leave nobody behind. Most of the things that are happening, we have seen in our work at the community level. We work down to the community level. Actually, we go to where people would not go because we work with the poorest of the poor, with people who are excluded, those who are living with disability, the women who are almost forgotten. When you have conflict or crisis, women are the most affected, because women are not the same as men. We must make that distinction.
What has been the success story of ActionAid in the last 20 years?
ActionAid has done a lot and I am smiling because we have affected many lives. We have projects like education of the girl-child. In the North for example, there are lots of children who do not go to school and we have had a lot of success because we engage the government, we are not government. A single person started ActionAid and that is Cecil Jackson Cole in the UK and that was to put some orphans and vulnerable children to schools. It was a welfare issue and then it went into the issue of charity and it wasn’t really working and making the kind of impact he was thinking. And so, we have moved into human rights approach that is to say, there is a right holder, there is a duty bearer, and so we must mobilise the people to demand for their own duty bearers to answer this and to provide basic social amenities. So, we go to places where maybe the schools are tattered and if we are in that community, we build the school. We will build the school and involve the government, because resources in Nigeria as we know are not getting to many places. And sometimes, if we conduct the need assessment and the community says we don’t want school, we want clinic because women are dying, we will contact the primary health, development agency and also the unit that are in charge of health and make sure that we construct a health facility. And when that is done, who takes over? And that is the process that you cannot ignore government. We know that there are capacity gaps on one side and you can have the capacity gap with right holders which are the citizens and you can have a capacity gap also with the duty bearers who may not know what to do. So, we get people together to ensure that they are able to talk together. We have put many children in school. We have lifted people out of poverty. We have a lot of projects and one of it is migration for example. We work on irregular migration and also forced migration.
Can you talk more on the issue of migration and how it is relevant to Nigeria?
We work on irregular migration in Edo State where we work with the Ministry of Interior Affairs to handle some programmes where we trained about 1500 young people- these are returnees and some of those who were vulnerable. We trained them on skills and we have female auto mechanic and a host of them in livelihood. In Maiduguri, we have forced migration because those ones are due to conflicts and we were able to take them through the process and we graduated about 2000 young people between the age of 18 and 25 years.
What has ActionAid done to bring to the barest minimum the rising tide of maternal and child mortality rate in Nigeria?
We are not government but we try to empower women wherever we go. We have worked across 30 states. The projects are different. What we have done in the area of health, we have worked on the issue of malaria before. In the early 2000, we worked in the area of malaria and then we also worked on HIV. In the area of HIV, we created and facilitated the founding of the network, which is for the people living with HIV. We also facilitated a network which is global, a Nigerian network on education. We facilitated the network on malaria. We also facilitated and brought in public finance analysis, that in budget tracking. We actually started it. In 2008, I went to Brazil with a team to go and study Bolsa Familia, which is a social protection programme, because we were fighting poverty and we were looking at ways in which government can also contribute. But in order to challenge or engage government, you need to be well informed. And so we went to Brazil and when we were called to provide technical assistance to the Nigerian government on social protection on Nigeria Social investment Programme, we were happy. We recruited and we went to all of the organisations that wanted to be part of it to make sure that there are on ground, and not be telling us lies, so that they can monitor the social investment programme.
From your experience, can we say that the social investment programme in Nigeria is working?
It has lifted a lot of people, we have published the report and it is in our website, but there is so much to be done, because they were given only 35 percent of the money they requested for. And 35 percent is not a pass mark. So, they need to give them the money. But the question of citizenship is not the will of those in Abuja alone that can be the success of the programme. A lot of people are corrupt. Like the young people who have been given the opportunity to go for N-Teach, for example, they have tablets and some of them would not go to schools, but they would collect the money. They also disconnect the tablets, because where you are is monitored. So, the quality of the citizenship is another problem. When you are looking at the young people, what it means to those who are supposed to be encouraged and are utilising such opportunity, a number of them are not, but some of them are doing well. But some see that the N30,000 has changed their lives. But those who got the 5,000, you need to know how poor people are in this country. Those who are complaining that the money is not enough is the wrong people who are getting it. If they can use the money, that money can lift many people. That money is not meant to stay there forever. It is supposed to lift people from shrinking further and also put them at the pedestal where they can help themselves and others also. There is a lot to be done. Why we successfully worked with them is that when we go to the field, we have quarterly meetings. When we take the report to them, they react immediately and we see the result. And our people come back from the field and tell us. Actually, it has affected so many lives but we can do more if only this demon called corruption is taken out.
Do you have other challenges in going about your duties apart from the corruption that you mentioned?
We have many challenges. You know we go to where many people do not go. That means you have to go into the interior. Some of the rural roads are bad and the rural infrastructure is affected. It is a terrible thing. Because you are looking at transporters who put their vehicles on the roads. A lot of roads are bad. But we are looking for more opportunities. We are happy that the government is willing to fight corruption. Most of the anti-graft agencies are doing wonderfully well, but their hands are also held, because a lot of issues are politicised. And we should not politicise this issue because corruption is killing people. Corruption is responsible for many deaths, because there are no new hospitals. You have the security votes and so many other things. What are they using them for? We work with the government and we have enjoyed the partnership of governmental agencies anywhere we have worked, and we would continue to work with them and would continue to provide the kind of technical assistance as we can, but our only solidarity is with the citizens; with the people.
