EDNUE Foundation in collaboration with Nile University of Nigeria’s Student Affairs department held a conference at the Nile University campus on November 6. The program, themed “Good Governance for Socio Economic Development,” was designed to bring young minds together to critically discuss the issue of governance in Nigeria and ways of addressing the problem of bad governance in the country.
This objective was highlighted in Miss Mariam Laushi’s (Good Governance Advocate and Pioneer Member of the Not Too Young To Run initiative) address. According to her, the biggest contributors to the enormous socio-economic inequalities in Nigeria are the twin problems of bad governance and corruption.
Miss Laushi’s sentiments were echoed by Mr. Busayo (member of the Follow The Money initiative), who, in his speech, cited corruption and bad governance as the biggest obstacles to socio-economic development in the country. Mr. Busayo decried the 21st century Nigerian youths’ penchant for criticizing bad governance on social media without taking the necessary actions to achieve the changes they seek.
According to him, for the problem of bad governance to be tackled, more Nigerian youths need to initiate or join schemes such as the Collective Development’s (CODE) Follow the Money initiative which was started by a group of young Nigerians to monitor the funds allocated by the government to public projects to ensure that said funds are actually used for the execution of those projects. In so doing, he continued, the youths will be able to hold the country’s government accountable for its actions.
The program ended with a question and answer session during which the speakers fielded the questions of the audience.
