Speaker of the House of Representatives, Hon. Yakubu Dogara\u00a0 \u00a0has canvassed for more funds to be allocated to the completion of the permanent site\u00a0of the National Institute for Legislative and Democratic Studies, Abuja.<\/p>\n
Dogara,\u00a0who made the demand while on an inspection tour of the project, said inadequate\u00a0funding has been a major obstacle to the project\u00a0and there was an urgent need for a collaborative\u00a0effort between the executive and legislature to surmount the hurdle.\u00a0 He lamented that the funding challenge was a spill-over\u00a0from the general financial constraints Nigeria has been witnessing in recent years.<\/p>\n
According to Dogara, funding constraint has been responsible for the dismal performance of the capital\u00a0budgets,\u00a0which more often than not does not attain more than thirty percent performance level each year.<\/p>\n
\u201cI remember that we had this kind of challenge with the EFCC Headquarters which was commissioned earlier this year. Until we put the right focus there, until we insisted that for anyone who wants to\u00a0visit Nigeria and check\u00a0how we are fighting corruption, their first point of interface is the EFCC\u00a0and they tend to look at the environment where the agency operates from. Where they were was not befitting.<\/p>\n
\u201cSo that attention was focused on that\u00a0building and by\u00a0the grace of God, the executive working\u00a0with the support of the National Assembly we\u00a0were able to get the funds in good time\u00a0and with the same Julius Berger to complete the EFCC Headquarters.<\/p>\n
“Now the attention should move here because the truth is that, we have always said this, if democracy is based on the rule of law it therefore means that for you to have a robust democracy your\u00a0laws must be robust.<\/p>\n
“In a situation where you don’t have an institution like this that models\u00a0parliamentarians and even some of our staff, you will\u00a0discover that the laws will be shallow and at the end of the day, democracy itself will be shallow, \u201che said.<\/p>\n
Dogara argued that if Nigeria desired\u00a0 to deepen\u00a0 her democracy,\u00a0 \u00a0it must\u00a0 endeavor to build\u00a0 institutions like\u00a0 NILDS\u00a0 not only\u00a0 to\u00a0 train the manpower needs of the National Assembly but to share Nigeria’s\u00a0 democratic experience with other\u00a0 countries in sub-Saharan Africa.<\/p>\n
Director General, NILDS,\u00a0Prof. Ladi Hamalai said the completion of the project will boost the capacity of the institution to deliver on its mandate.\u00a0 According to Hamalai, the institute has been seeking collaboration with\u00a0other prestigious institutions with similar mandates in other parts of the world and therefore\u00a0needed to put its house in order.<\/p>\n
“We’ve been constrained in terms of space and lack of facilities in training\u00a0of personnel\u00a0in the National Assembly and across the ECOWAS parliaments even when such training are\u00a0funded by donors. So this will give us the opportunity to really make here a training hub at the regional level. You also know that we have already trained several parliaments at the temporary site. By the time we move here, I am sure many African countries will convert it to their training ground.<\/p>\n
“We will have enough space to hire more experts, we will have enough space to collaborate with prestigious institutions abroad. We’ve be talking with several institutions like Johns Hopkins in the\u00a0United States of America. We would also be able to have a world class library as you can see from the tour of the building. So a lot of things can be done from here especially the coverage of the ECOWAS countries,” Hamalai said.<\/p>\n
The multi-billion naira project which began in 2011\u00a0is being executed in two\u00a0phases. The first phase which has reached about 60 per cent completion consists of the\u00a0Main Academic Hall, Convention Centre, Library, Lecture Halls, Reception and\u00a0Administrative Block. The second phase consists of the\u00a0Services Building\u00a0which houses the\u00a0Power\u00a0Generating Plants and Hostels.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Speaker of the House of Representatives, Hon. Yakubu Dogara\u00a0 \u00a0has canvassed for more funds to be allocated to the completion of the permanent site\u00a0of the National Institute for Legislative and Democratic Studies, Abuja. Dogara,\u00a0who made the demand while on an inspection tour of the project, said inadequate\u00a0funding has been a major obstacle to the project\u00a0and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":13348,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13393","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/everyday.ng\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13393","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/everyday.ng\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/everyday.ng\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/everyday.ng\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/everyday.ng\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=13393"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/everyday.ng\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13393\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/everyday.ng\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=13393"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/everyday.ng\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=13393"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/everyday.ng\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=13393"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}