The Inter-Party Advisory Council (IPAC) has revealed plans to partner the Chinese Embassy to train some politicians on politics and how to improve the economy through governance.
The IPAC National Chairman, Engr Yabagi Sani stated this while receiving delegations from the Chinese Embassy led by the Head of political Section in the Embassy, Du Sheng.
Engr Sani said the Council is looking for ways to train, empower and build the capacities of politicians, especially those who are in charge of running political parties.
“We are looking at how we are going to empower our political parties by way of training and capacity building and also put the legislature on their toes to deliver on their mandate to make laws for the country.
“Most importantly, we want to see how representatives of political parties who today are governors, as we all know, the states are centres of government activities as regards delivering dividends of democracy to the people.
“We are also trying to see how we can make that tier of government people orientated by way of delivering on their mandates to improve the welfare and the security of the people.
“We are going to discuss issues of capacity building for politicians especially those who are in charge of running political parties, in doing that we are already discussing with National Institute for Legislative Studies (NILDs), we also have an onging arrangement with NIPSS and Chinese Embassy who have graciously offered us opportunity for our people to travel to china and be trained in certain areas so that going forward we will be able to improve not only on our politics but also our economy”, Sani said.
The IPAC National Chairman further said they have come up with a peer review mechanism, which is a way by which people who are supposed to produce results are given an environment where competition thrives.
“Meaning that we want to be able to measure the performances of our governance in the internationally accepted standards of measuring performance, that is the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
“We believe that the only way we can make our Governors perform is when we interact with them and get them to buy into these internationally accepted standards of measurement of performance of government”, he noted.
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Sani however stated that the objective of the meeting is for them to have this mechanism put in place and, as they believe “it will fast track the achievement of these parameters that when you look at them, it is the aggregate of what government is supposed to achieve for their people, that is why we are here today.
“That is why we have the partners here today to deliberate on the methodology and the most effective way that we can achieve these goals for our people. Other countries have done very well in terms of achievement of SDGs”.
On his part, Sheng commended IPAC on the successful conduct of the last general election. He said “in our embassy’s view the election was a success to democracy and to Nigeria as a country.
