Daily Trust

Representatives of civil society organisations and media practitioners yesterday began a two-day workshop in Abuja on how to properly monitor, evaluate, report as well as learn documents relating to extractive industries, especial in the oil sector.

In her opening remark, Faith Nwadishi of ‘Publish What  You Pay’, said Nigeria as one of the first country to sign the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI) in 2004, has only conducted two audits on the oil extractive industry through Nigeria Extractive Industry Transparency Initiative (NEITI) with the last taking place in 2005.

She said both audits had a lot of challenges and expected a change in the 2006 audit, adding that non governmental organisations have been in the forefront of sensitizing people through town meetings in all the geographical parts of the country about what NEITI and EITI were doing.
The coordinator lamented that when civil societies paid a courtesy call on National Assembly members, they were ignorant of certain things happening in the industry.

She faulted the NEITI law that gives the country’s president the right to choose civil society members into the board of Multi Stakeholders Working Group that forms the management organ of NEITI.
According to her, civil society members should be allowed to come together to choose who they want to represent them.
Participants, who were later formed into groups, worked on projects linked up with indicator protocol, plan for data acquisition, data quality issues and analysis.

Highlights of the event were goodwill messages by Pact Nigeria, OSIWA, USAID and a paper delivered by Otsemaye Newton.
Uzor Ogochukwu and Austin Udechukwu also presented papers on introduction to indicators and steps in selecting indicators respectively.