National Assembly has expressed readiness to launch an application known as ‘NASS Eyes’ to monitor budget transparency and implementation by Ministries, Departments and Agencies (MDAs) of government.
Deputy Speaker of the House of Representatives, Benjamin Okezie Kalu, made this known in Abuja, saying the initiative will also include adherence to the principle of federal character by affected MDAs.
Kalu, who dropped the hints during a courtesy call on him by the management team of AfriLabs, a high-tech company, over the weekend, said that the mechanism is driven by conscious effort of the parliament to effectively check the performance of budgetary allocations to agencies of government.
He said: “So, while you think about the economic and entrepreneurial space, also think about innovations in leadership, through technology. How do we employ that in our oversight functions, so that we can be in our offices, heading our committees and also monitoring what is happening in various MDAs of government; so that our oversight functions will not only be based on the bundles of papers submitted to us on the day we visit these MDAs, but a continuous analysis of what they are doing, day in, day out?
“A dashboard that is in the parliament to see what is being captured in the MDAs will inform members of the parliament better. So, by the time they visit it, they would have gott sufficient information that would help them oversight tax payers’ money more efficiently. It is something we must think about.”
He added: “We are thinking in that direction and we are about launching what we call ‘NASS Eyes’, the eyes that will be beaming the MDAs while they are working. They will be expected to upload some of the key performance indicators that we will give to them.”
Earlier in her presentation, the executive director of AfriLabs, Anna Ekeledo, told the Deputy Speaker that the company is providing multilateral support systems to many organisations across the African hemispheres in terms of capacity building, among others.
Meanwhile, the Chairman, Senate Committee on Finance, Sani Musa, has said genuine and deliberate collaboration between the legislature and executive arms of government could produce a robust fiscal policy that would effectively address Nigeria’s economic challenges and boost revenue generation.
Musa explained this in a statement, yesterday, amid preparations by a joint committee of the Senate, chaired by him, to engage heads of federal MDAs in interactive public hearings this week on the 2024-2026 Medium Term Expenditure Framework and Fiscal Strategy Paper (MTEF-FSP).