My perception about Nigeria has changed –FES Nigeria Rep

[SunNews]

By JULIANA TAIWO-OBALONYE

The tenure of Resident Representative, Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung (FES), Nigeria, Thomas Mattig,   comes to and end soon and he will be departing on May 29, finally.

In this interview, he admits that he did not experience all the negative things he was told about Nigeria before his coming hence his new position as Nigeria's ambassador.

Mattig also speaks about his time in the country, his work and adventures in over 15 states he visited and leaves a strong warning to the Nigerian government to fight corruption, build industries, create jobs and remove all the bureaucracies that frustrate development if it truly wants to leave the woods of under-development.

Mattig is particularly glad that FES under his watch in over three and a half years succeeded in changing perceptions between parliament and labour unions, civil society organisations and other stakeholders on issues of election security, Nigeria's foreign policy, budget control, , among others. 

How did FES impact on Nigeria during your stay?

FES is a German non-profit organisation committed to supporting social democracy. So, we say social democracy is a democracy that delivers benefits to the citizens not just on paper. Not just democracy that exist only on paper but where the people don't really get those dividends of democracy.

So, our mission is to support that. A lot of what we do is supporting trade unions' work that is our own background. We come from the German Labour Movement and have close ties with the German Social Democratic Party. So we support the labour unions as workers representatives but also as political actors in the country. Then we work on governance issues, with the Independent National Electoral Commission but also with several civil society organisations, small grassroots organisations that are pretty much everywhere in the country. We also handle governance issues, budget control, preventing violence, working with youths, we publish analysis. Nigeria is a very book hungry society so we publish analysis on different issues and we organised discussions on Nigeria's foreign policies because is a very important issue in the country and we think the more the people are aware of that and the more they discuss it the better not only for Nigeria but also for Africa.

So what have we accomplished in the last three and half years is difficult to assess because we don't work like other agencies that build a borehole and is there for everyone to see. But we work on very long term base. We supported democracy during the military era, helped to rebuild the NLC after the transition because we didn't work with them when they were state controlled but when they became independent again we worked with them.

I think the last three years in those three areas – governance, labour and foreign policy we had some successes you could see. For example with INEC we supported the establishment of inter-agency consultative committees that would work for security of the elections. Even though there were post election violence, I think the whole security set up was an improvement. In the labour field we managed to highlight some topics like industrialization, social security, strengthening the unions on that angle.

On foreign policy we established SIRA – Society for International Relations Awareness. We midwifed the organization and it has its constitution, registered, published books. So that is one thing I am quite happy about.

And also personally I am glad that I feel in Germany people are seeing Nigeria with more interest now and understand that it is more complex. Ii is not just about the oil country, not just a country of Boko Haram, or just a country of corruption. All these things exist but there is much more to it.

What were the challenges with all those you worked with particularly the government agencies?

There are always challenges especially when you work with governments.  Usually the bureaucracy is very heavy. Sometimes you send a letter you don't know if anybody has seen the letter or if it has disappeared but whenever the government participated in our programmes I was very happy. Just recently, we had a meeting on industrialization with the unions and we had two representatives from the ministry of commerce and investment and they made very valuable inputs and they said look, why didn't you invite us before now we have all these information, engage us.

The country is always strongest when people from different strata come together. When you have trade union, civil society, government and National Assembly, and they are interested in actually creating something or making progress the society works better. INEC was a special case because, we had a new INEC with Jega coming in and they were very open towards cooperation, very interested. They don't just come to your programmes but we sit down way in advance, discuss, think about it and then we implement together. So this is an ideal real partnership on high level and not just a donor agency but real partnership and I wish we would have more of that with the government. Because clearly there are extremely qualified people and they have to struggle with a lot of challenges as well. We can't help them with the challenges but once they get out of their ministries and engage there are so much benefits.

Are any of your conclusion implemented after meetings for instance on INEC?

Yes. For INEC, the inter agency consultative committees was not there before but after our meeting it was there. And sometimes you always have communiques, like last year we had something with the Nigeria Police/INEC pretty much all security agencies and some civil society organisations. We also had very good communiqués where they highlighted some security challenges during elections they want to work on. But sometimes that is the benefit of even bringing people together for one or two days who usually don't talk with each other that much, I mean that is democracy. As government you open your doors to people and when they invite you, you go there and talk and sometimes we were just able to shatter some of these perceptions when people have bad ideas about each other.

 

Via: Sun News Online