WASH: How lack of sustainable oversight by parliamentarians perpetuates gender inequality in Bwari

By John Akubo

Bwari Area Council in the Federal Capital Territory despite being the host to Lower Usuman Dam Water Treatment Plant (LUDWTP) the main source of water supply for FCT and environs is not lucky to give potable water to its inhabitants.

The Dam which is owned by Federal Capital Territory Water Board (FCTWB) is located in the Ushafa community about 9km from the Bwari Area Council headquarters, yet the residents have not been able to enjoy the benefits of potable water supply.

Many of the residents who can not afford to dig their own boreholes are left with no option but to depend on water vendors that draw their water from boreholes and charge exhorbitant amounts.
With the current economic situation, a female student of Government Day Junior Secondary School, Ramatu Danasebe narrated her ordeal in carrying out morning chores before going to school.
She said, the taps in their area stopped running over two years ago adding that even when they were functional they were not reliable due to the epileptic supply.
Explaining further, she said, due to the non availability of clean water, she is made to go through the hurdle of fetching water from a borehole in another street far away for a fee to be able to get water for the house chores and to take care of her sanitary needs.
While doing this on daily basis she indicated that the situation makes her to go late to school which impings on her academic performance negatively. Her narrative is similar to those of some of her school mates who are also girls.
Felicity Omanibe another student in a private School in Bwari also lamented that the water scarcity has been having a telling effect on her in that it makes her not to focus on her studies as before and after school she is forced to go to fetch water for the home chores and the flushing of the toilets.
The Executive Director, Conscience for Human Rights and Conflict Resolution (CHRCR) Idris Miliki Abdul pointed out that access to water and sanitation are human rights. “Where females are unable to enjoy those rights, their health is profoundly affected, curtailing their educational and economic opportunities, and denying them their full role in society.”
Explaining further he said, without safely managed water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) services, women and girls are more vulnerable to abuse, attack and ill-health, affecting their ability to study, work and live in dignity. Improvements to WASH at home, school, work and in public spaces support gender equity
“Women and girls usually have the responsibility of fetching water. This can be a dangerous, time-consuming and physically demanding task. Long journeys by foot, often more than once a day, can leave women and girls vulnerable to attack and often precludes them from school or earning an income.”
According to him, there is nothing specifically that talk about gender in the budget but when you push money in certain sectors, it reflects on budgets that take care of gender interests.
“For instance, if you put money into water, it has direct impact on women since when there is no water, the women suffer most. When you put in more money into health, we talk of maternal mortality rates and Ante Natal Care.
“So there are some segments in the health sector that really address the issue of women and even men inclusive. But sometimes when we talk of gender, a lot of people look at women. So when you put money into all these specific areas, it means that we are putting on our gender lens because the women will benefit, it will also address the issue of children.
“So these are some of those specific areas you need to look at when the issue of gender budgets is at stake.
“But there are no sections of the budget that mention the word gender. So it’s for you to be able to identify within the budget process and then the budget approval to say, look this sector money has been allocated to it to address gender interest. That is the general principle of gender budgeting.
“If you breakdown the budget for agriculture, for instance, you will be able to see that a lot of rural farmers are women and so you need to put in specific provisions that address women needs in that budget? By so doing in the analysis, you’ll be able to say, okay, this budget reflects gender interest.’
The National Update checks revealed that, all the attendant outcomes of lack of water in the Bwari Area council are happening despite the sum of N48,152,880,105 as 2024 budgetary allocation for the “Greater Abuja Water Supply Project (multilateral/bilateral project tied loan)” as allocated by the Federal Capital Territory Administration.
The amount represents 73 per cent of its total budget of N65,262,626.636, as observed in the 2024 Appropriation Bill released by the Budget Office of the Federation.
President Bola Tinubu had presented the 2024 budget which he dubbed the “Renewed Hope Budget” to a joint session of the National Assembly on November 29, 2023.
Some experts who spoke on the issue attributed the anomaly to lack of proper oversight by the legislative arm of Government.
The Nigerian budget has been a topic of discussion regarding its inclusivity and the effectiveness of parliamentary oversight, especially in terms of its impact on gender. A guide on equity and inclusivity in the budget process suggests that Nigerian states can adopt practices to develop and implement budgets that are gender equitable and socially inclusive.
However, a gender analysis of the 2024 budget reveals that the inclusion of women in budget allocations is still lacking, with a very small percentage allocated to the women’s ministry and other related projects.
It is also crucial to note that oversight role of the Nigerian parliament in ensuring accountability and transparency in the budget process is another major issue in this context.
Legislative oversight is intended to check the excesses of the executive arm of government and prevent wastages in governance.
However, studies have shown that while oversight activities have increased, they have not been very effective in reducing corruption and improving budget performance.
This ineffectiveness in oversight can contribute to the failure of the budget to address gender disparities adequately.
To this end, the President of Change managers International Network and National Coordinator of 100 Women Loby Group, Felicia Onibon while speaking on how failure to carry out proper oversights affect gender budgets said,
“Well, gender budgets in itself is a gender mainstreaming strategy. It’s a strategy that allows governments and groups generally to ensure that both men and women are considered in the scheme of things, so it’s not an accounting process.
“So you don’t have to be an accountant to know gender budgeting that’s why everybody who needs to work on policy issues, mainly for nations should have a good idea of what gender budgetting is all about.”
She also indicated that it is important to have a good idea of gender dynamics; what happens with boys and girls, what happens with men and women in any aspect of the society.
“So for men and women, boys and girls, to be effectively captured in the development of a nation, the gender budgeting strategy needs to come to play and that is why a lot of us feel strongly that first and foremost, we should target the National Assembly, who are actually meant to represent us in lawmaking, and then the executive, civil servants that are meant to actually do the core budgeting process for us. “If they do not have an understanding from the gender point of view, the budget that they will turn out will not be a live budget.
“It will not be a budget that would consider the feelings and the needs of the people, both men and women, young and old. So that’s why they need to have that gender lens and for them to have the gender lens, they need the training.
Over the years she said they have done a lot of training for budget officers in the federal civil service.
“Our colleagues that are working at state level are meant to have done something similar at state level and then apart from targeting the executive or the civil servants, it is also very necessary for the lawmakers to have a good understanding of what it’s all about.
“So that when the budgets are prepared and sent to them, when they are looking at it, they should be able to note the fact that the budget is not compliant enough to take care of both men and women, boys and girls in the Nigerian society.
“If they don’t have that knowledge, they cannot correct any anomaly that comes from the executive. So that’s one aspect.
“The other aspect is that the issue of oversight will be difficult, you know, for them to do effectively if they are not grounded, in gender budgeting processes. If a budget has been approved and the executive move on to implement whatever approval has been given when the legislators go out to check if things have been done, they do not have the tools to check if this is benefiting both men and women in their society.
“They can just say, oh, we have water in this community. We have been able to give them water. Who are those using the water? Who is in charge of the water? What is the process?
She narrated what she saw on social media where somebody gave water to a community and some other persons in the community went to put a padlock.
“I was wondering why that should be, but they just don’t want some members of the community to have access to the water.
“So if you go further, it may be some kind of discrimination to a group of people and it could be discrimination against women and children on a flimsy excuse that they will come and scatter the place, that the place will be dirty, you know.
“It could also be that somebody wants to be making money out of it for people to come and pay to use that water. So when you look at it deeply, who pays? And where do they get the money from? Is it not free?
“Has it not been given either by government or by some philanthropist? Why are you locking it up? So some of those kind of deep questions the legislators may not ask and they may not even care to go, they may just say that, oh, okay, we’ve given them money to have water. My contractor said the water has been done.
“They will go the first day, they do something like an opening ceremony, and water comes out of a tank. You don’t know if the tank was filled with water from elsewhere just for that process.
“So what gender budgeting does is that it gives you the inner knowledge to know if indeed some of the constituency projects that the National Assembly members have in their communities are reaching the poorest of the poor, is reaching the rich, is reaching everybody.
“The women, when you ask them, so what is the situation of things with your market? Are you now able to access a good market? They will tell you how they feel about the new market that has been built or hospital.
“So the kind of questions that follow, maybe during oversight function in communities will determine if you understand the dynamics between the providers and also the people that you represent.
“The same thing with the National Assembly, doing its oversight, a proper oversight over the ministry. We have approved this budget for you. What did you do with it? Do you have a template to show that it has gone to the right places? Or have you addressed those pertinent issues that have to do with both men and women in our communities? How many boys are in school? How many girls are in school? “Of all the out-of-school children have you been able to identify the number of girls that are out of school and number of boys that are out of school? Where is your plan to support monies that have been approved for girls to have access maybe to free books or access to school or access to the kind of uniform that they need to have, So those questions.
“I can tell you that if they ask those pertinent questions that have to do with human beings, not just that we have approved this budget or this money has been released for this. If somebody is asking questions that has to do with the effect of the release of funds or the effect of a budgetary process within a particular fiscal year, in both the communities and in also the duty bearers table, then people will know that this is a serious affair and that’s what gender-budgeting does.
“It makes the whole thing come home to every individual that is involved in the process, from the duty bearers to the people, the electorate, who need those things, and the legislatures, who give final approval and programs.
On the legislators and their greed whereby they lobby to ensure the projects are skewed to be executed by contractors loyal to their whims and caprices, she said
“It is just this monitoring, and unfortunately, the civil society that would have been helping to monitor all these processes by the day, they are being pushed out of the scene.
“The experience I had with MDGs, for example, when the MDG projects were approved, and when monies went out to both legislators and otherwise contractors to do work, civil society members and professionals were coopted into the process of monitoring and evaluation of those processes and because of that singular action, what it did was that all those who collected money and did nothing were brought to book.
“Civil society members and some professionals, engineers, architects, went into the fields to look at those things.

According to her community members started making phone call to their legislators who were meant to have taken care of some projects telling them that, EFCC is at the site.
“They didn’t know who we were but they will say, ah, the EFCC is around. They have come to see your project. They have told us to take them to the site of the project and then you will now see the lawmakers running Helter skelter, at least in some of the states, we saw some legislators traveling down to actually make sure that their contractors start work.
“This shows that, If money is released for a certain project, if there is no follow-up checks by independent individuals, nothing will be done and that’s what we are seeing.

We got to some communities. When you are driving past, for example, in the whole of Ekiti state, when you are at Ekiti, through Kogi, when you leave Kaba and you are going towards Ado-Ekiti, you will see a lot of projects on the main road. They will put MDGs there, but when you just stop and say, okay, let me check if there’s water in the taps, there is no water.
“This means that they needed somebody to trigger them to do something. And that’s what they do for almost all the projects. So there is need for another oversight, which means as the legislators were meant to come to do their own oversight function, the civil society are also meant to do their own and report as appropriate. Maybe things will get better with that.
According to her the most important thing is that there is need for constant training especially as there is high rate of lawmakers that may not return.

This investigation is for the GENDER, THE AGENDA project for Gender Strategy Advancement International (GSAI) supported by the Wole Soyinka Center for Investigative Journalism (WSCIJ), and the MacArthur Foundation”.