Group Wants Commission To Coordinate NGOs

The Civil Society Organisation on Community Advancement and Humanitarian Empowerment Initiative (CSCHEI) has urged the federal government to establish a Civil Society Commission.

According to CSCHEI coordinator, Kunle Yusuf, the proposed commission would be tasked with coordinating the affairs of over 45,000 registered non-governmental organisations (NGOs) currently operating in Nigeria.

Speaking at the launch of CSCHEI’s projects and programmes in Abuja yesterday, Yusuf said his group has been advocating for the creation of such a commission for close to a decade.

Yusuf said, “It’s been a long time we’ve been struggling to have a Commission of Civil Society in Nigeria. We started this call about 7-8 years ago.

“The Civil Society Commission has not been approved. We started the Disability Commission; it has been approved; we are part of the people that started the Diaspora Commission that has been approved and it’s now an agency of the federal government.

“We hope that in a few years to come, the civil society as a Commission of the federal government would also be approved.

“So, what we are doing now at CSCHEI is coordinating, promoting, supervising, mobilizing all the registered NGOs, CBOs within the content of community, social and humanitarian empowerment in Nigeria. It may interest you to know that presently we have over 45,000 registered civil society and NGOs in Nigeria but almost 17,242 are within the component of community social development and humanitarian empowerment.”

A former speaker of the House of Representatives, Dimeji Bankole, who chaired the launch, charged the audience, mostly youth, to take initiatives and hustle for themselves as nobody would give power to them.