Suddenly, it appears the Non-Profit Organisation (NPO) law and commission bill first tabled before the national Assembly in 2016, is gathering a new momentum, especially with the confirmation by the Nigerian Army that some CSOs may be involved in money laundering and anti-state activities. But are these enough reasons to promulgate a new law and body in a sector perceived by players to be already over-regulated? Gboyega Alaka, who interacted with stakeholders in the sector, explores the issues.
PERHAPS, no issue has generated more apprehension amongst stakeholders in the civil society organisations circle in Nigeria in recent years than the Proposed NGO regulation Bill.
Known in some quarters as the Non-Profit Organisation (NPO) Bill, the bill, first sponsored and introduced to the House of Representatives by Hon. Umar Buba Jubril in June 2016, aimed at enlarging government powers to regulate, monitor the funding and operations of Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOs) and Civil Society Organisations (CSOs) and generally put them in check.
Subsequently, a similar bill was sponsored by Sada Soli, a member of the APC representing Katsina in 2017, seeking to establish the legislative framework to regulate the activities of NGOs and Civil Society Organisations (CSOs). The bill passed second reading at the House of Assembly and had subsequently been referred to the Committee of Civil Society Organisations and Development Partners.
Proponents of the bill are of the argument that Non-Profit Organisations are poorly regulated and require a regulatory agency, specifically for regulating their funding streams.
According to the proposed bill: “the [regulatory commission established under the NGO Bill] shall facilitate and coordinate the work of all national and international civil society organisations and … will assist in checking any likelihood of any civil society organisation being illegally sponsored against the interest of Nigeria.”
Recall that scores of stakeholders and CSO operators had marched to the National Assembly, protesting against the bill and requesting that it be dropped on the day of its public hearing. They saw it as an attempt to gag them and stifle their operations.
For some reason, the committee did not present its report to the House, hence it was assumed that it had been shelved aside.
In 2019, however, Speaker of the House of Representatives, Femi Gbajabiamila announced that the bill would be revisited, following allegations by the Nigerian Army that a particular NGO, Action Against Hunger, an international humanitarian organisation then operating in the Northeast, was supplying food and medication to the terrorist Boko Haram group.
Expectedly, that NGO was blacklisted, but it again drew attention to the sector and an interest in the bill.
As recently as July, 2022, the new version of the bill by Hon. Sada Soli, was presented, for a second reading, on which occasion the Deputy Majority Leader, Peter Akpatason, recommended that copies be made available to members before further contributions be made.
That, of course, was an indication that the bill was still very much alive and it was a matter of time before it saw the light of day.
Is the Non-profit sector really poorly regulated?
However, in the opinion of Professor Deji Adekunle (SAN), Lead Research at Juritrust Centre for Legal Research and Documentation, the proposed bill and commission is ‘going nowhere.’
Admitting that he had not read the latest version, Prof. Adekunle, whose organisation reviews and studies legislations and laws and apply them to social problems, said, “I looked at a version four months ago and I told myself this is going nowhere. Even within the National Assembly, they are also very sensitive to what the civil society organisations say, because they understand that CSOs can tar or improve their image.”
This, according to him, is however not to say that the sector does not want to be regulated, as the sector is already well regulated by the Federal Inland Revenues laws, the Company and Allied Matters 2020 (CAMA), the Special Control Unit Against Money Laundry (SCUML) amongst others.
“As a corporate citizen, you cannot say you don’t want regulation; and as a Nigerian, you have not only rights-bearing but also duty-bearing responsibilities,” he argued.
Having said that, Adekunle described as ‘superfluous’ certain aspects of the proposed bill that requires NGOs to seek government’s approval before embarking on projects, arguing that “there is no NGO that is involved in development activities that will not require government’s consent if it intends to make impact. So putting it in such a law is just superfluous.”
Still Adekunle insists that the provision in some cases amounts to going extreme, asking, “How can you ask me to come to Abuja for approval for a road project in Imeko Efon in Ogun State?”
He also argued that if the target of proponents of the bill is to gag CSOs in the rights protection area, then it falls flat on its face, as the constitution already protects them.
“The constitution protects free speech; so you cannot gag them. The same constitution, for instance, also states that if anyone is indigent, you must provide legal aid. Such approval may, however, be needed for some other things like an NGO building a dam or constructing a road in certain places.”
Adekunle conceded, however, that the extra attention the sector is attracting may be due to the fact that some NPOs, especially religious bodies, have become vehicles for laundering terrorists money camouflaged as funding, while it is not impossible that some have laundered crime proceeds, knowingly or unknowingly.
“These are templates that happen in other countries. As far as terrorist funds are concerned, I know that the DSS have signposted some not-for-profit organisations, especially Quranic schools and Quranic movements as laundering funds for terrorists. Some of them were even proscribed. But do you throw away the baby with the bath water? Or do you kill a fly with a sledge hammer?”
The Lead Researcher also argued that such a trend is not as widespread as to require an extra law, stating that the move is driven by jealousy and rivalry among government officials, who feel that CSO operators are enjoying undue privileges.
“Some people’s thinking is ‘why should foreign agencies be paying citizen’s organisations money when they could donate it to the government?’ They believe that the funds that donor organisations generate can be channelled as aid to the government directly, but hey, people have control over their money.”
Besides, he argued that these are different templates. “What they give to countries is different from what they give to CSOs. The budgets are separate.”
He explained further that the rivalry he is talking about is not government per se but ‘narrow-minded’ public officers who cannot stomach how individuals could be entrusted with such huge funds while they work the whole day in the offices from 8 to 5 and never get to see a dollar.
On the allegation that some people establish CSOs with the sole aim of accessing donor funds to live large, Professor Adekunle concedes that some people have no doubt messed themselves up in the way they handle funds, but stated that (donor) organisations have a way of dealing with such people or organisations – which is by spreading the word among their network.
“You may call it blacklisting. There are many of us, bright social scientists, idealists; who want to do things and are fired by ideas but have no single skill about management or financial management. And then the dollars come and they begin to buy this and that. Before you know it, the project is moribund. And that is why they started the EU-ACT Programme of capacity building, to teach them social entrepreneurship, teach them about compliance, teach them advocacy and how to sustain their work.”
Asked what he and other stakeholders would be doing to make their grievances known to the authorities, Professor Adekunle said, “This kind of bill will not pass without a public hearing. The second is that members in the legislature, whether in the Senate or House of Representatives listen to enlightened constituents. And I can tell you that letters have been written to many of them, that do not touch that bill, if you want to come back home.”
Asked if that could be the reason the bill has been in the House since 2016, Adekunle stopped short of saying, ‘your guess is as good as mine’.
Like Professor Adekunle, Harry Udoh of the Guild of Community Development Advocacy in Akwa Ibom, an umbrella body for CSOs in Akwa Ibom State, aligns with the popular notion among fellow CSO operators that the sector is over-regulated but stated that this stems from the fact that those unleashing these regulations largely misunderstand the sector.
To regulate a sector, you need to have a proper understanding of it, the lack of which, he said is tantamount to stifling the sector, which he averred is playing very critical roles in the development of the nation.
“In all aspects of this nation’s development, civil societies are playing very critical roles, and it is not different from what obtains in developed societies. Take America for instance, the CSOs play very critical roles, and they (the authorities) realise that and work in collaboration with them. The regulation there is very straightforward and is not such that constricts or stifles the sector. But here you find that every Assembly season, some people are coming to sell the idea to some persons to take up.”
Self Regulation or Participatory Membership as panacea
As a panacea to this imbroglio, Udoh said stakeholders in the sector have agreed to come up with what they call, ‘Self Regulation; something akin to what the Nigerian Bar Association (NBA) does to law practitioners.
“What we have tried to do within the civil society sector is to show integrity, legitimacy and relevance of the sector by ourselves coming up with what we call self-regulations. And this self regulation will be tied around the extant laws of the land, to show those who have doubts about the sector and the legitimacy of the sector, that we ourselves, want to ensure that our hands are clean; we want to ensure the legitimacy of what we’re doing and show that we are ready to work within the frame of the laws of the land.”
Like Adekunle, Udoh admits that no nation would allow an individual or corporate organisation to act as it likes; he therefore said the CSO community would be amenable to the proposed bill and commission, if it will be “manned collectively by people who have fair understanding of the civil society sector; the eco-system in which we operate, the different layers, the different levels, and the dynamics around it… A number of us are of the opinion that the commission would be hijacked by state actors; but if we are able to push it in the way that we want to see it go, then it’s going to be a win-win for all, and it would assuage the fears of the state actors, and also booster the image of the sector.”
Expatiating further on his idea of Self Regulation, Udoh said, “It is the coming together of the sector to develop a framework for adherence to the extant laws of the land, such as the CAMA and the SCMUL (which stipulates that if you receive certain donations, you must declare it, the purpose it is to be used for and what you’re using it for. All of these have been put together.) And then we are putting for ourselves a minimum operating standards and guiding principles, and we’re asking that CSOs to voluntarily adopt these mechanisms for their organisations and implement them in their organisations. And then we are looking forward to having a situation, where there would be a body, perhaps the commission, which would now look at what the organisations are doing to conform to their own self regulation modalities.”
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He opined furthermore that a certification may be integrated into the process to accord a pass mark to any organisation that is deemed to have met and is running with the minimum standard.
In his words: “That would now endear the CSO to the donor and to the beneficiaries, who are now sure that the money collected on their behalf is been spent judiciously and they are not short-changed. This way the CSOs are working in a way that the donors, the regulators and the beneficiaries of such interventions are happy with what we are doing.”
“We’re working together with the regulators. We’re hoping to have an equal number of state actors and civil society actors as members when such commission is finally established. I am talking of people with not less than ten years experience working in the sector and pushing different thematic areas to provide that balanced contribution that would help to sanitise, not just the sector but the Nigerian environment,” Udoh elaborated.
Ayo Adebusoye, who is chairman Board of Trustees of the Lagos State CSO Platform (LACSOP) also feels strongly about the unending regulations, and is particularly suspicious of the so-called NGO Regulation and Commission Bill (as proposed by Soli), because the authorities seek to externally regulate a sector they know little about.
“Many CSOs are not even fully aware of the many control systems on ground. Yet the perception of many out there is that the NGOs are still not regulated enough, which is why they keep bringing more regulations. And whenever they bring it (new regulation) up, CSOs normally would kick back because a lot of the times, we see that the motivation is to clamp down. Meanwhile, one of the provisions of the constitution is freedom to associate.”
Having said that, he concurred with other stakeholders that there may be room for improvement, even as he insisted that the intention had to be right.
To mitigate this unending meddlesomeness from the authorities, Adebusoye, like Udoh, is also suggesting Self Regulation.
“One of the things that are coming up strongly now is that the society of CSOs has decided to self-regulate. We feel that is the most effective way that we can be independent of the civil service sector. Part of the plan is to come up with a code of conduct, which we will all subscribe to.”
The alternative, he said, is:”If the government insists on coming up with this NGO Regulation board or commission, let us begin to make suggestions – because there are gaps. There are a lot of issues regarding the cumbersome registration process for small organisations operating in a local government for instance, file documents, annual reports, annual statement of affairs, which is now one of the new regulations in the 2020 CAMA Part F….
“The civil societies are very broad, so we are of the opinion that there should be different categories, with different levels of reporting, so that we would not affect the works which they are doing.”
To buttress this point, he cited an instance where in Lagos, an NGO wanted to do some work on deworming in the health sector in some communities. “It was a three-month intervention but because the NGO had to be moving from one ministry to the other for registration, the time for the project elapsed without them even being able to commence the project. So what I’m saying is that we need to harmonise and have a one-stop shop at the national and sub-national level, where one could go and have everything done, or online from the comfort of your home through your phone device. Register; basically do everything you want to do.”
When reminded of a major criticism against the sector, which is that they do not want to be controlled, Adebusoye said: “We need to look at where that mentality is coming from. Ignorance, perhaps. Already there are regulations, especially under the Special Control Unit against Money Laundering (SCUML) of the EFCC, which up till last year; non-profits were also listed, where they had to be giving accounts of their various transactions. There was of course penalty and sanctions, but one thing is to have regulations, the other thing is the enforcement. So the regulations are there, but what we are saying is, like other sectors and professions such as the NBA and the ICAN, we need to be able to self regulate. And because civil society is broad, we are looking at how we can get our self regulation going, so that we ourselves can be able to effectively operate. This, of course, would also include abiding by the statutory regulations of CAMA.”
Should the government insist on going ahead with the bill, Adebusoye, whose LACSOP represents over 300 CSOs and serves as a liaison with the government of Lagos State, said the body is already talking to the authorities on bringing its own insight, based on experience, which would engender the sector and not constrict the civil society space.
This feature is supported by the Agent for Citizen-Driven Transformation (ACT) Programme