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OPINION: My Pension, Your Pension In the Hands Of ‘Lagos’

Published

1 year ago

May 21, 2024

By Suyi Ayodele

Lagos does not have restraints when it comes to spending money. His first name is Nínál’owó (Money is meant to be spent). His middle name is Gbogbo ejò jíjeni (All snakes are edible). But I won’t keep quiet while he puts my future in the incinerator of his ways. Lagos is like an agbara ojo (erosion). Yoruba elders say àgbàrá òjò ò’lóhun ò nílé wó, onílé ni ò nì gbà fun (the mission of erosion is to destroy the building; it is the owner that will resist it).

The Yoruba word for spendthrift is àpà. There is Arungún (ruiner of inheritance) sitting very close to àpà. Both are relations of ikán (termites) in Yoruba semiotic. No matter the semantic shift exercise one carries out on each of them, they give the same meaning; denotatively and connotatively. Àpà is a waster. Arungún, otherwise known as Omo òsì (child of misery) is a destroyer of inheritance or estate. He is a typical reverser of fortune. Nothing is too precious for an àpà or an arungún to destroy. Termites eat up anything, no matter how precious.

There is an Ekiti folk song that warns of the activities of an arungún. The song warns of the implications of leaving one’s inheritance in the hands of a waster. Èhìn ayé enin/ kò se fi sílè fún omo òsì (One should not leave one’s estate for a waster child). No parent prays to have such a child to inherit his or her estate. No matter how many years it took the parents to build their estates, once such are inherited by an arungún, the estates go into ruins within a short period.

Years ago, an elderly man, a senior journalist, pointed at a telecommunications mast on Ugbague Street, Benin, to me. “You see that mast over there, Suyi”, he said. I followed the direction of his pointed finger and affirmed. He continued: “Will you believe me if I tell you that that plot of land and all the plots that have now turned to market once belonged to an Esama of Benin Kingdom?” I answered that it was not possible. My little knowledge of Benin chieftaincy matters tells me that only the wealthiest becomes the Esama of Benin. The elderly fellow affirmed that, and added that the owner of the property was once a wealthy man and was conferred with the title of Esama by the reigning Omo N’Oba then.

But upon his death, his arungún children sold off the estate the man had such that nobody could remember that their forebear was once the richest man in the Kingdom. The elderly fellow told me the story behind the ruinous heritage of the once prosperous Esama. I reserve that story for another time when we would have the time and space to discuss it. Pray you don’t have an arungún to inherit your estates; they leave such in ruins! Terrible!

Arungún omo abound in our localities. We have wasted estates of once prosperous parents in our neighbourhoods. Nothing can be worse than for people to say the family of Mr. Làkásègbé was once wealthy. Once an arungún manages an estate, the siblings end up as paupers! Because of an arungún, children of butchers beg for bones, and those of the wealthy roam the streets in abject poverty. Nigeria has been unfortunate with its arungún leaders, especially those we have had since the collapse of the First Republic. From the North to the South; from the West to the East, all the legacies left behind by the founding fathers of the country have been laid waste by the arungún children who took over leadership positions.

Nigeria is a typical example of a family once in wealth but now in poverty. Our case is not because our natural resources have dried up. No. God has blessed us more than many prosperous countries of the world. We have many other natural resources that we have not even tapped. Our problem lies in the fact that we have had termites as leaders. We have been unfortunate to have wasters in the helms of our affairs, at virtually all levels of government. We are a nation led by leaders who don’t save for the future. We have been ruled and ruined by those who eat the yam tubers and the seedlings for future planting seasons. They are the type called òjusu jègùn (he who eats both the yam and the sprouting seedlings) in my native tongue. The elders of my place, again, say an òjusu jègùn has eaten the next harvest (òjusu jegùn; àmódún ló je).

Nigeria is the only country where people work in the civil service for over three decades and retire into penury. We are not known to pay gratuities to retirees at the point of their disengagements from public service. Many of them die without collecting their gratuities. While Kayode Fayemi was governor of Ekiti State, he came up with a ‘novel’ solution to gratuity payment. He asked retirees willing to get their entitlements to let go of as much as 25 percent of their gratuities, otherwise, they will wait till only-God-knows-when! The last set of retirees in the state who got their entitlements were those who retired in March 2014. In the last 10 years, no retiree in Ekiti State has been paid his gratuity. Worst hit are local government and primary school teachers’ retirees, who have not been paid gratuities since 2012! The same thing goes for the monthly stipends to retirees known as pension. Stories abound about how senior citizens die on the queues while waiting to collect their pension. These are people who spent their youthful years serving their fatherland!

To address the problem, the administration of President Olusegun Obasanjo introduced the Contributory Pension Scheme (CPS), in 2003. Under the scheme, both the employers and the employees are compelled to contribute a certain percentage of the employees’ salaries to the fund on a monthly basis. The funds are also placed in the hands of independent financial institutions known as Pension Fund Operators (PenOP) to manage. The beauty of this scheme is that while government intervention in the management of pension is eliminated, employees in the private sector (corporate bodies), who were hitherto at the mercy of their shylock employers, are also accommodated.

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Speaking recently at a meeting with PenOP, Obasanjo said that one of the major reasons for the pension reform was his pain at seeing so many pensioners queuing up to collect their pensions, especially during his first term in office. The retired General stressed that he was particularly pained to see military men who had served the nation, spending hours or days to collect their pensions. “With this in mind, we resolved to see how the government could make pension management and administration private sector driven and more in line with global best practices. I was pleasantly surprised at the growth of the pension assets over the last 20 years as my administration instituted the pension reforms, and pushed to have a bill to reform the way pension administration was done in Nigeria. They did not think that the assets would grow this quickly and have the positive effect it has had so far.” The former president enthused. In the last 20 years, the funds in the various pension accounts, contributed by workers in the public and those in the private sectors, have grown to over N20 trillion. That is how leaders grow estates. That is how forebears take care of the future. But hand over such an inheritance to an arungún omo, the people will be in pain afterwards.

The over N20 trillion in the pension funds account is the next nectar that the Lagos man in charge of our affairs is targeting to lick in the name of building infrastructure. Having drained all the available resources, the President Bola Ahmed Tinubu administration is taking his predatoriness to the pension account. To many of us, we don’t find this behaviour strange given the fact that it fits perfectly to the financial identikit of President Tinubu as a Nínál’owó. Expectedly, since the Tinubu administration, through its Coordinating Minister for the Economy and Minister of Finance, Mr.Wale Edun, muted the idea of taking the owó ojú eégún (money kept in the masquerade’s grove), hell has been let loose on the government. Also, many groups, obviously members of the government’s Hallelujah orchestra, have been unleashed on the media space to defend the government.

Former Vice President and presidential candidate of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), Atiku Abubakar, while reacting to the development said that the move is “illegal”, as “there is NO free Pension Funds that is more than 5% of the total value of the nation’s pension fund for Mr. Edun to fiddle with.” Atiku, who was with Obasanjo when the pension reforms that resulted in the over N20 trillion being coveted by Tinubu and his Lagos boys warned: “Even at that, this move must be halted immediately! It is a misguided initiative that could lead to disastrous consequences on the lives of Nigeria’s hardworking men and women who toiled and saved and who now survive on their pensions having retired from service. It is another attempt to perpetrate illegality by the Federal Government. The government must be cautioned to act strictly within the provisions of the Pension Reform Act of 2014 (PRA 2014), along with the revised Regulation on Investment of Pension Assets issued by the National Pension Commission (PenCom). In particular, the Federal Government must not act contrary to the provisions of the extant Regulation on investment limits to wit: Pension Funds can invest no more than 5% of total pension funds’ assets in infrastructure investments.”

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As it is wont to do, the Tinubu government unleashed his attack Rottweilers on Atiku and every other person that has risen against the intending daylight robbery of the pension funds. One of such nondescript groups, the Independent Media and Policy Initiative (IMPI), equally led by one Niyi Akinsiju, I am told he played the same under President Muhammadu Buhari, said that by voicing his opinion against the move to use the pension funds for infrastructural developments, Atiku had merely become “a government critic and opposition leader.” One wonders what Atiku is expected to do if he could not criticise bad government initiatives! The group quoted sections 5.1, 5.2 and 5.15 of the Pension Reform Act, 2014, to justify why the light-fingered Federal Government of Tinubu could dip its filthy hands into the pension pockets and spend the funds therein. Ridiculously, IMPI assured Nigerians that after tampering with the funds, the government would guarantee its safety on the jejune argument that the “…FGN issued securities are considered as the safest of all investments in domestic debt market because it is backed by the ‘full faith and credit’ of the Federal Government, and as such it is classified as a risk-free debt instrument.” Nonsense! Balderdash!! Bunkum!!!

It baffles me why some people deliberately choose to be fatuous. If the Federal Government could guarantee the safety of the pensions, why was the need for the pension reform in the first instance? Where was this Akinsiju of a mould, when pensioners were dying in their hundreds on the queues waiting for their pensions? Is he that ignorant to note that what this wastrel government intends to spend belongs to workers in both the public and the private sectors? That the pension funds belong to workers of the government’s civil services and those from the infamous AFAMACO JOB (work without pay) of Benin? Can Akinsiju and those in his caste tell Nigerians how many of those things committed to this government in the last one year it has been able to secure? Can he tell us how this government met our economy and how low it has taken it? What was the cost of living before Tinubu came on May 29, 2023, and what is the cost of living now? How on earth would anyone want to commit the future of hapless Nigerian workers both in the public and private sectors to the hands of these thriftless individuals who spare nothing? How long would our leaders behave like common arungún and we would clap for them?

I have no doubt that this government is both deaf and dumb. I suspect also that compassion is in abysmally short supply in this era. I am equally of the strong opinion that neither President Tinubu, nor his boys and hangers-on, have any soupcon of respect for the Nigerian masses. But I want to quickly tell them that the pension fund is the life and last hope of many Nigerians currently working in the private and public sectors. If I were Tinubu, I would not touch their money!

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OPINION: For Tinubu And Sanwo-Olu [Monday Lines 1]

Published

6 hours ago

June 9, 2025

Editor

By Lasisi Olagunju

“When lions battle, jackals flee.” Isaac Newton wrote that to his bitter rival, Gottfried Leibniz. It was a barbed remark on their feud over who between them invented calculus. The more you read of the mutual respect those two had for each other, the more you wonder why they ended their respective careers in very bitter, reckless animosity; the more you also ponder over the cost of that fight and whether it was worth the troubles.

President Bola Ahmed Tinubu and Governor Babajide Sanwo-Olu of Lagos are two big men who are not equals. One is the boss, the other the boss’s boy. They are not equals, so, there cannot be a rivalry between them over feats and achievements. But they fight; and it is right here in the open. I’ve heard people demanding to know what they are fighting over. We do not know. Let no one talk about Lagos speakership. The sack of Mudasiru Obasa, which was as abortive as Dimka’s coup of 1976, was just what it was – a symptom; it was a reaction to something; there was an underline cause. What was it?
Sanwo-Olu and his boss are no Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz and so their fight couldn’t be over who takes the priority on a matter designed to help humanity. If there is a delectable Queen Cleopatria somewhere, I would have drawn a parallel between what is unfolding in Lagos and what unfolded between Rome’s Octavian (Augustus Caesar) and Mark Anthony. But there is no seductress in the mix, I will, therefore, not deliver to age what it is no longer capable of tweaking.

So, what did Sanwo-Olu do? Or what did he not do? Both sides are not talking. All we’ve seen was an ungracious rejection of a friendly gesture; the snub of a handshake by the more powerful potentate. We’ve also seen a convenient skip of the junior power where he ought to speak.

Politics is a fast-paced game. You slept yesterday at the war camp and woke up today to news of a ceasefire. But the wise knows that political feuds inflict invisible wounds. They use that to explain why political wounds never heal and wars never end even when you read texts of forgiveness consequent upon atonement for unknown sins and apologies for unstated crimes.

Some people are happy, clinking glasses over the power buffetings in Lagos. They drink to the health of the feud; they wish it greater vigour; they wish its fire is unquenchable. These are people who do not like Lagos and its politics at all and who have been their victims. They see the fight as the elixir that would cleanse the land of all its sins and cure it of its sicknesses. They talk of power and its excesses. They point at Akinwumi Ambode, the man who was brought low so that Sanwo-Olu could ride high. They remember Babatunde Fashola who escaped breathlessly simply because he was like Coca-Cola, more popular and successful than the parent company. They point at a Governor Bola Tinubu of Lagos who serially used three deputy governors in a tenure of eight years. If I were the president, I would also look at this unedifying statistics and repack my big and small intestines.

A leader should be very careful on the way he treats his people, particularly, the companions who look up to him. There was an Orangun of Ila who bulldozed his way to power with charms, and then elevated the humiliation of his principal chiefs to an art. An Ila historian wrote that the king’s “humiliating treatment (of the chiefs) reached intolerable proportions when he frowned at seeing the Iwarefa (the kingmakers) in decent attires. When a chief made a new garment, he was obliged to excise the breast and patch it with a rag.” But every reign, no matter how glorious or inglorious, must come to an end. How did it end for that oba? He didn’t die on the throne. His character gave him a fate which made him farmer outside power. Ó fi’gbá ìtóòrò mu’mi nínú oko (he drank water with ìtóòrò melon calabash on the farm). I suggest you read ‘The Orangun Dynasty’, a very rich 1996 book on the history of the Igbomina stock of the Yoruba, authored by Ila Orangun’s very first university graduate, Prince Isaac Adebayo; check pages 40 and 41.

A leader is a masquerade; he must not tear his own veil. When a leader makes and unmakes subordinates, he rends his own cover. “Ènìyàn l’aso mi” is a Yoruba expression which, in English means “people are my clothes; they are my covering.” As a Yoruba proverb, it emphasizes the importance of people in people’s lives. Whatever cloth the masquerade wears is that ‘thing’ that makes the wearer an Egungun. He must protect it because it is his store of power. But my people say power is like medicine; it intoxicates. A researcher adds that “ultimately, the accumulation of power becomes dangerous even to its owners.” Is that why someone saw “a link between mask and menace”?

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So, when we interrogate the use of power by the one we have come to call Lagos, we should always remind him that the costume is the sacred adornment which people see, respect and venerate in the masquerade. For a leader, his principal boys and girls are his costume, they are his cover. He needs them when harmattan comes with its fury. And harmattan will come whenever the masquerade repairs back to the grove when the festival is over, and it will be over.

Even lions, kings of the jungle, place great value on strong bonds within their prides for survival and well-being. There is an old Irving King song on this: “The more we get together/The merrier we’ll be.” That song emphasizes human interconnectedness; the support embedded in community.

Jackals are opportunists, and they are many in this Lagos fight. Newton’s feuding-lion imagery is an evocation of the themes of strength, of hierarchy, and of consequence. It defines the strained relationship of one big expert with the other big man. The other part of his proverb ‘bombs’ the miserable jackals, minions who lurk around the battlefield, who thrive in chaos and on scraps from the feuding powers.

American novelist, Herman Melville, says a thousand fibers connect us with our fellow men. We should not live our lives as if we exist only for ourselves. Public ‘spanking’ of a governor for unknown and unsaid sins is petty. A president should have snubbed rebuff as his option of engagement. If I were him, If a ‘boy’ offended me, I would just ‘face front’ and concentrate on delivering the Chinaware I carry unbroken. If your load is a pot of palm oil, avoid stone throwers.

But the president is not pacifist me. He enjoys fighting wars after wars. He is like Sango who desperately desired a fight but found no one to fight. Sango looked round and pounced on the wall and wrestled with it. There was also an Aare Ona Kakanfo who itched for a battle and could get none. He stoked a rebellion at home against himself and by himself violently put it down. Because of this and many more like it, the man was nicknamed Aburúmáku (the wicked one who refuses to die).

Are there no elders again where the feuding feudal lords come from? I read texts calling for propitiation. Why not? Appeasement without reason may look stupid but Napoleon Bonaparte settled it long ago when he said that “in politics stupidity is not a handicap.” Borrowing lines from Ulli Beier, I would say that now that men appear to have failed to stop this war with reason, women should be called upon to come and kill the fire. Our mothers are like Osun, “the wisdom of the forest; the wisdom of the river. Where the doctor failed, she cures with fresh water. Where medicine is impotent, she cures with cool water.”

The first lady should therefore step out, open her Bible (KJV) to Mark 4:39 and read to her husband: “And he arose, and rebuked the wind, and said unto the sea, Peace, be still. And the wind ceased, and there was a great calm.”

If she does that, I will be encouraged to give the president two lines from William Shakespeare: “Come, wife, let’s in, and learn to govern better;/ For yet may England curse my wretched reign” (2 Henry VI, IV, ix, 4).

If our president’s reign won’t be cursed for wretchedness, he should prioritise the people’s welfare over serial petty fights with his boys. Nigerians are panting at home and reeling in pains at work; on the road, they groan. They are not entertained at all by presidential beer parlour brawls like Musician Ayinla Omowura’s last fight. You don’t become king and still keep trysts with crickets. No.

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OPINION: Ijebu And Their Six Tubers Of Yam [Monday Lines 2]

Published

6 hours ago

June 9, 2025

Editor

By Lasisi Olagunju

One of the first jokes I picked when I moved to Ibadan 30 years ago is that failure of patronage is the only reason a drummer would go to Oke Ado. The Ibadan surmised that the Ijebu who lived almost exclusively at Oke Ado part of Ibadan never ever got moved to spend a dime on bards.

Those who minted that joke should come back from the dead and see what we see now with the Ijebu. When the day breaks tomorrow, I will go to Oja’ba in Ibadan and ask folks there why their ancestors with relish said that the Ijebu did not appreciate good music and would not put their money on it. The Ijebu I see today do what the Ibadan said they would not do. In a magnificent way, they mass in their capital annually and stage a spectacular festival of culture and splendour. They call it Ojude Oba (the King’s Forecourt). It is an annual festival of sumptuous songs and dance, a parade of success and cultural opulence. They held another edition yesterday, and it is already contagious. Other Yoruba towns appear to be getting bitten by the Ijebu bug. We watch as they evolve.

The Ijebu are a very scrupulous people. It is in their oríkì that their fathers had six tubers of yam: they ate two, sold two and offered two to their gods. You can ponder that again: with moderate six survival items, they did justice to their present; justice to their future through trade and investment; justice to the divine who held the rope of life. Anyone who approaches life methodically like this is not likely to fail in any enterprise. In nuanced ways, the oríkì suggests that those who managed the six tubers did not eat with ten fingers. Their descendants still do not do it today: they party hard but they also work hard and trade intelligently; they worship God with utmost devotion.

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I watched a short video clip of the Ojude Oba event at 8am Sunday (yesterday). I grinned seeing everywhere in immaculate lush green, meticulous. Sponsors of the event, Mike Adenuga’s Globacom, has done it for a record twenty years. And both company and owner say they won’t stop doing so forever. Patriotism is love of country. So, what is love of home? “In love of home”, says Charles Dickens, “the love of country has its rise.” That is what Adenuga and his Globacom commit themselves to with Ojude Oba till eternity. With Globacom’s heavy lifting, Ojude Oba has become the biggest cultural festival in Nigeria today. They say they are taking it even further than where it is. Something there to copy by every big, rich man and woman from other towns. The ones who feel too big to lift their homestead to glow will likely live ‘homeless.’ We all should know, as William J. Bennett did, that “home is a shelter from storms – all sorts of storms.”

I did not read history, but I am a lover of history and a believer in what it teaches. I keep seeing in the past the road that led to today, and a possible pathway to the future. T. O. Ogunkoya, author of ‘The Early History of Ijebu’ published in December 1956 offers some glimpses into the elements that make up the Ijebu gene:
“Nobody knows the date of the first migration to Ijebu or the course that it took. Tradition states that it was led by a man named Olu-Iwa accompanied by two warrior companions, Ajebu and Olode. Olu-Iwa settled at Iwade, for Ijebu-Ode itself did not, as yet, exist. Ajebu was instructed to mark out with fire the boundary of the new land. He went westward to the lagoon and marked out the boundaries to the North, South and East as well. To Olode was given the task of marking out and planning the future city, a task which took him more than three years. So well did Ajebu and Olode do their work that the new town was named after them as ‘Ajebu-Olode’, now corrupted and called Ijebu-Ode.”

The writer of that history said “there was ample evidence in favour of this tradition. He wrote that “In Ijebu-Ode today there stands in a prominent place in Olode Street a tomb dedicated to him and bearing the inscription ‘The resting place of Olode.’ In Imepe Street there can be seen a tomb dedicated to the memory of Ajebu. It may be taken for granted that these two men are historical figures whose names have been perpetuated in the name of the city.

Ogunkoya wrote that there is another theory of the origin of the name. He said “Portuguese maps of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries showed cuidade de Jabu or ‘the city of Ijebu.’ Now it is argued that the Ijebu, in common with people of similar ancestry, used the word Ode as a generic name for a town. So the Itschekri people had Ode Itschekri (Warri). The Ondo had Ode Ondo and the Ilaje Ode Ilaje. In Wadai (Sudan) there was an Ode Ijebu, suggesting the transference of the name of the ancient home to the new. In support of this view it is to be noted that until very recently all the village people in the province referred to the city simply as Ode. As they themselves are Ijebus they merely point to their capital town without associating their name with it.”

Note the meticulous mapping of the boundary and the planning of the city. Note that the exercise reportedly took whole three years! Note the communal appreciation of the pioneers who got the job done. Put all those side by side what other chapters of their history say of their survival as a people. They pay attention to details. They valourize themselves as masters of money. They say they’d been spending shillings before the white man arrived (Omo a n’áwó silè k’Óyìnbó tó dé/ Òyìnbó dé tán owó òún pò si). I plan to ask my Ijebu friends what that means. I will tell you whatever they tell me.

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Fourteen Years Of FOI: CTA Holds S’south Roundtable As Edo AG Seeks Open Governance

Published

7 hours ago

June 9, 2025

Editor

By Joseph Ebi Kanjo, Benin

Edo State Attorney General and Commissioner for Justice, Dr. Samson Osagie, on Monday said that any state government that desires to achieve true accountability and citizen engagement
must throw open the windows of its public institutions.

Osagie spoke at a South South Regional Roundtable on 14 years of Freedom of Information Act in Nigeria organized by the Centre for Transparency Advocacy (CTA) in collaboration with the Edo State Ministry of Justice.

Represented by Mr. Festus Usiobaifo, Principal Counsel, Edo State Ministry of Justice, the Attorney General, while noting that his ministry, has, over time, “supported disclosures through inter-agency cooperation, training of public officers on compliance, and advisory opinions that promote openness in governance,” stressed that there is room for improvement.

He added: “Our ministries, departments, and agencies must not wait to be asked before releasing public information.

“Data on budgets, contracts, procurements, and public health, for instance, should be available by default.”

Earlier, in her welcome address, Executive Director, CTA, Faith Nwadishi, noted that the regional roundtable was part of a broader effort under the “Strengthening Accountability and Governance in Nigeria Initiative (SAGNI)—a 12-month project we are implementing with support from the Rule of Law and Anti-Corruption Programme (RoLAC) and funding from the European Union through International IDEA.”

The ED, representated by Mr. MacDonald Ekemezie, Programme/Communication Manager of CTA, added that the regional roundtable became necessary “because the challenges around access to public information in Nigeria have reached a critical stage,”

She further noted: “Even with efforts made by CSOs, some ministries and agencies, it is still difficult to obtain clear, timely, and complete information from most government agencies especially at the sub-national level and Local Government Areas.”

The ED lamented that fourteen years after the signing of the FOI, its implementation remains weak, and that many citizens are not aware of it or does not know its usage.

“Fourteen years later, we must ask ourselves, ‘How far have we really come? Yes, there has been progress. But implementation remains weak. Many public institutions still operate in a culture of secrecy, while some are yet to establish the FOI unit.

“Some websites are inactive even when the laws require proactive disclosures of information by MDAs. Some agencies both at the federal and sub-national levels outrightly refuse to respond to FOI requests,” she said

On the level of usage amongst citizens, the ED said “from our work and recent baseline study in Anambra, Edo, and the FCT, we have seen the same patterns over and over again:
Over 70% of respondents have never used the FOI Act.

“Only 45.8% know how to apply for information.
Among those who have tried, over 75% received no response.
Youth, women, and persons with disabilities—some of our most critical voices—remain largely unaware or unsure of how to use this tool.”

In his goodwill message, Chairman, Nigeria Union of Journalists (NUJ), Edo State Council, Comrade Festus Alenkhe, lamented that despite ascension by President of Nigeria and recent judgement by the Supreme Court of Nigeria, many states are yet to fully implement or respond to FOI request.

On his part, Dr. Jude Obasanmi, Chief Responsibility Officer, Jose Maria Escriva Foundation (JOSEF)., said based on the review at the roundtable, there was a need for continuous and sustained engagement because “people should not define the benefit of the law based on their comfort zone”.

“Today, there is a governor and tomorrow another person will be governor. So, let us put a mechanism in place, such that if tomorrow that person is not there, such law they enacted would also be beneficial to them after leaving office.”

He said though they have achieved a level of success, there is room for more engagement to carry more people along in FOI implementation.