The Nigerian Civil Society launch “Buharimeter” to track Buhari’s campaign vows delivery

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The Nigerian Civil Society has launched an online application to track the delivery of pre-election promises made by Nigeria’s president, Muhammadu Buhari.

The web-app, announced on Monday by the civic group, holds data on all promises made by both the ruling All Progressives Congress, APC, and Mr. Buhari while campaigning for the 2015 general elections.

It is part of the digital governance revolution in Nigeria, helping the use of online tools to deepen the country’s democracy and make government accountable and transparent, its creators said.

The app was built by the Centre for Democracy and Development with support from Open Society Foundation West Africa and a leading budget data analytics, Budgit.

Buharimeter measures the implementation of Mr. Buhari’s campaign promises and displays a visual report. It documents promises made by the current government in different sectors for easy tracking.

The performance of the government will be measured using three related methods.

First, it will crowdsource Nigerians’ contributions to discussions, comments on policy pronouncements of the government in achieving its set targets and surveys.

Second, it will carry out policy and media monitoring exercise.

“Policy statements will be acquired, analysed and used as basis for gauging the performance of the government,” Idaya Hassan, director of the centre said.

The third approach is physical checks on projects.

At its launch on Monday, three days after the president was sworn in, the website showed that no project had been achieved, and none declared “not achieved” either.

Its “On-going” bar had a slight fill of green, attributed to the president’s secret declaration of his assets. The president had promised to declare his assets publicly.

He is yet to do so.