The African Centre for Media and Information Literacy (AFRICMIL) and the Network of Anti-corruption Institutions in West Africa (NACIWA) have reached an understanding to work together to entrench whistleblowing as a viable tool for achieving transparency and accountability in the West African subregion.
This was the outcome of a meeting AFRICMIL held with Ayo Peter Olowonihi, Commandant of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) Academy and coordinator of NACIWA secretariat in Abuja. AFRICMIL team was led by Lewis Asubiojo, director, and included Kolawole Ogunbiyi, programme manager, and Godwin Onyeacholem, snr. programme officer.
The purpose of the meeting, which was at the instance of the EFCC, was to explore ways of leveraging on existing mechanisms within NACIWA to promote the use of whistleblowing as an instrument for fighting corruption in ECOWAS member states.
Asubiojo briefed Olowonihi on AFRICMIL’s activities through its Corruption Anonymous (CORA) project which he said has been supporting the whistleblowing policy of the Nigerian government since 2017. The project, which is supported by the MacArthur Foundation is being implemented in collaboration with the Presidential Initiative on Continuous Audit (PICA), a unit in the Federal Ministry of Finance, Budget and National Planning which manages the whistleblowing policy.
Ogunbiyi noted that AFRICMIL is the only civil society organization in Nigeria with a focus on whistleblowing and that it was important that some of the activities that had led to the achievements recorded so far in institutionalizing whistleblowing in Nigeria be replicated in the ECOWAS states.
Olowonihi said he was delighted to meet with AFRICMIL and praised its efforts in promoting the whistleblowing policy in Nigeria. He observed that the anti-corruption agencies alone would not win the war against corruption and expressed regret that NACIWA had only existed on paper since it was founded in 2010. “There has never been any physical office. It’s now that we are beginning to set up a secretariat in the Academy, thanks to Abdulrasheed Bawa, the EFCC chairman who was recently elected president of NACIWA,” he noted.
The Commandant of the EFCC Academy said AFRICMIL’s request to leverage on NACIWA to promote whistleblowing in West Africa was achievable in two ways. First, he said, AFRICMIL could be included in NACIWA programmes to make presentations on whistleblowing anytime the network organizes an event. These presentations could be structured in a way that they would feature peer review of policies and legislations of member countries on whistleblowing. The second option, according to Olowonihi, is for AFRICMIL to source for funds to organize events on whistleblowing for senior members of anti-graft institutions in member countries.
He said the EFCC would work with and support AFRICMIL in terms of providing facilities for such meetings.
Following the meeting, AFRICMIL plans to develop a list of countries in West Africa that have whistleblowing law or policy and coordinate a network of civil society organisations in the subregion working on whistleblowing and whistleblower protection.
