Stakeholders in Nigeria’s extractive industry have launched a mobile app – RemTrack – to track and enhance transparency and accountability issues.
The executive director of OrderPaper Advocacy Oke Epia, tells Business Insider SSA that the app will stimulate healthy and constructive engagement among citizens. Stakeholders say mobile app advances Nigeria’s quest for the transparent extractive industry.
To enhance transparency and accountability issues in the oil and gas sector and allow citizens to monitor and follow up latest trends, OrderPaper Advocacy Initiative in conjunction with the Civil Society Steering Committee (CSSC) of the Nigeria Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (NEITI), launched a mobile app, RemTrack.
In 2003, former President Olusegun Obasanjo’s government opened up the extractive industry by signing the global Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI).
The process includes improving Nigeria’s macroeconomic environment, pursuing structural reforms, strengthening public expenditure management, implementing institutional, and governance reforms.
With the development of the RemTrack app, the sector will witness easy engagement while the app makes accurate information readily available for use in Nigeria’s extractive industry.
In an interview with Business Insider SSA at the unveiling of the app in Lagos last Tuesday, Oke Epia said the app will stimulate healthy and constructive engagement among citizens and serve as a pointer to possible leakages, wastages, and gaps in Nigeria’s extractive industry.
When asked about how the app can get to the grassroots level, Epia explained that every Nigerian citizen has a role play in the popularising the app by downloading and using to track the sector.
“As we have in our ConsTrack mobile app for civic engagements in budget and public projects tracking, the RemTrack app boasts of the highest standards of content verification and validation which have gone through layers of vetting across value chains.”
Waziri Adio, the NEITI boss, said the emergence of RemTrack will immensely add value to the work of his organisation and called on Nigerian citizens to take advantage of the platform for healthy and constructive engagements.
The essence of RemTrack app in Nigeria
The NEITI boss noted that the app is a major milestone in attempts to fix remediation issues arising from his agency’s reports.
He explained that RemTrack has come to simplify the process of tracking issues and implementation of recommendations arising from periodic reports of the agency, and more importantly, to involve all stakeholders, whether players in the sector, journalists, civil society organisations and all citizens who have mobile devices, in the process of remediation.
“RemTrack tool would enhance easy engagement by all and make accurate information readily available for use at any time,” Kolawole Banwo, Chairman of the Civil Society Steering Committee of NEITI, said.
