In this interview, we speak to Kalilu Ibrahim Tutangi, Chairman of the National Council for Civic Education and Development (NCCED), one year after its formation.
Kemo Cham tried to find out what has happened in the last 12 months since President Bio announced the formation of the entity he said at the time would champion his crusade to re-enlighten Sierra Leoneans about nationalism, as part of his development aspirations.
Politico: It has been one year since the Council was established and you at the helm. What has it been like in this period?
Totangi: It’s been challenging; but from the outset I encourage myself into believing that much as it was challenging, the task ahead of me was not insurmountable as long as I kept my focus on it.
Politico: When you are starting a new institution in a country like Sierra Leone, especially one with the role of civic education, everybody would expect it to be challenging. Just give us an idea how has it been like trying to put the necessary structures in place.
Totangi: I was appointed to this job in August of 2018. I was a lone wolf on the job and towards the end of August I got parliamentary approval. One of the first things I did was to find a place to sit. We found a tentative home within State House where we were bunkered in one room for some time. I was alone so I asked the Presidential fiat of State House, through the Secretary to the President, for me to have a lean staff. So they approved that I have three task force members, whom I started with. Later on I also encouraged them to allowed me to have volunteers. There were about seven of us, including myself, three volunteers and three taskforce members.
Some of the things that we did were to develop a strategic plan. In his maiden address to parliament, the president said that if we are to develop as a nation, we must educate our people on their rights, responsibilities and obligations as good citizens.
We were formed by a presidential proclamation. We have not gone through a statutory instrument. We are a national programme designed to create civic awareness and consciousness among the citizenry. And we also help people to learn how to become active, informed and responsible citizens, so that they can ask questions of duty bearers and so they can also make meaningful contributions towards the democratic and development process of their country.
So we focused on getting a clear road map as to how we wanted to progress with this, through consultations with a steering community. By the way, we do not have a board as at now, we have a steering committee - which is supposed to be made up of all the political parties in parliament and several civil society organisations and gov’t [MDAs].
But over time, many of those political parties representatives fell along the way for one reason or the other. But we have a core of five to seven dedicated people who are very much supportive of us. We have the chairman who also coincidentally is the chairman of the NGC, Dr [Denise] Bright. We have somebody from the Teachers Union. We have the National Youth Commission Chairman. We have somebody from the civil society. We have Dr Fatu Taqi from 5050 Group, who is now being represented by somebody else.
These are the ones who guide us in some of the things that we are doing. So together with them we came up with a set of things that we said our institution is supposed to be doing.
We have our vision, which is a well informed and engaged citizenry that is actively participating in the democratic process and drives the development of the nation. And we also have seven pillars that are our core programmes. Five of these pillars are actually programmatic areas and two others are institutional development things. For instance, we have Open Government Partnership (OGP).
OGP existed alongside OGI [Open Government Initiative] in the last dispensation. But now we only have the open government partnership which is a global commitment of citizens and institutions around the world who are committed to openness, transparency and accountability.
The other one is national cohesion and peaceful coexistence.
We have civic education, engagement and partnership. We have electoral processes and voter education. And we have cross cutting issues, including HIV, Climate Change and a lot of other malaise that we have in our society.
So what we did in the last three or four months ago is a national consultation around the draft strategic plan. We took it to all of the regional headquarters town, we encouraged MDAs, the local Councils, CSOs, for them to look at the document that we are proposing and to have an input into it.
We are hoping that in the first month of the year [2020], hopefully we will sit again with these stakeholders for us to validate and finalise our strategic plan.
The OGP is the number one pillar in our strategic plan. Sierra Leone committed to the Open Government Partnership principles in 2014. So every two years we do what we call the National Action Plan. When we came on the scene in 2018, there was a national action plan due by August, the same month I was appointed. So we reached out to the OGP global in Washington to say that we could not meet the deadline for the National Action Plan. They came to Sierra Leone, the Deputy CEO in Washington and the Regional Coordinators for Central Africa and West Africa. We met several ministers to have their buy-in into the OGP concept. And we also went to the president and he also committed his government to openness and transparency.
This national action plan is a set of commitments that governments make to open the government and make it transparent. And for each of those commitments, we have a number of miles stones, ways that we can measure whether government is living up to those commitments.
So in this current national Action Plan, we have eight commitments. One of those is access to justice. The details are boring...
Another thing is the issue of gender. We know the emergency we see with issues of rape and the violation of women and girls. We have committed to keeping a data base of violators and to make sure that we know who they are and where they are, so that we can make sure that we keep our young girls away from them.
A number of other commitments are made.
While we are doing all of these, we put together an eminent group of Sierra Leonean educationists who have been working in the area of curriculum development, people like Joe AD Allie, Magbele Fyle, and a number of them, who have knowledge in issues around civic education. We have been working with them for the last eight months. They have brought us a draft of what they see as the curriculum and the learning materials for the teaching of civic education from class one to JSS three.
We exposed that to peer review. There were several other MDAs who were interested in what we will be putting into that document. So we called NRA, we called Human Rights Commission, we called SLRSA and all other institutions for them to come and see whether the issues that they care about, like road safety, whether we have dealt with them adequately in that document. So they have also made their suggestions which has even led to radical ordering of the book and contents. We are now waiting for the facilitator to give us a report from that and we will convene again in early January or early February to try to finalize that document and get ready to deliver it to the Ministry of Basic and Secondary Education to be included in our curriculum by the next academic year.
Politico: From what you have highlighted, you seem to have done a lot in the last one year. But when the president made the proclamation forming NaCCED, did anybody have any idea what he wanted, beside just civic education?
Well, the President said he wanted to ensure that we develop a curriculum and teaching and learning materials for civic education and to get civic education taught on the curriculum in schools at the basic education level. That was his proclamation. But when I was appointed to the job, I sat down and did a whole profile of what this will look like. And I proposed that it was important that we have civic education taught in school, but we should recognize that civic education is a continuum, it’s not only for schools. A lot of our compatriots missed out on civic education. A greater portion of our population were not taught civic education in schools. So we have decided that since civic education is not for the teaching and learning of civic education alone, but it is to support our development process, it is important that we have a way of engaging society generally around issues of civic education. This is because one thing we wanted to do here is that we wanted to cultivate civic knowledge. And when we cultivate civic knowledge, we are going to be putting out information. We want people to develop civic script. So when people go to vote, they would be in a position to see what they are voting for. The next continuum in that paradigm is what we would call civic disposition, where people will now be at a position and they understand that yes, somebody maybe your wife, but they have a right to self-determination. They have a right now to decide who they vote for. So you and your wife now can decide what candidate to vote for without being disagreeable. This doesn’t happen in one day, it is a process.
You don’t just get up one day and begin to rush at it. We have seen the attitudinal and behavuoural change campaign. They reduced it to sensitization. This is not sensitization. This is full blown education, which has a way of going around all of these with a kind of methodology that should be long lasting.
So what I want to do is to have a strategic road map to all of this. So that this is not going to be about Kaliliu Totangi anymore. So I might get out of here but there is a blue print so that anybody that is here would be in a position to follow up with some of these things that we are doing without having to reinvent the will.
There are a number of challenges, and we have done things, but until we home all of these things, we bring them into one, we see them rolled out seamlessly, that’s when we begin to feel that we have achieved anything.
Politico: One of the reasons why I asked the last question is that many people believe that NaCCED is a duplication of responsibility, when you look at the role NCD [Nation Commission for Democracy] is playing.
Tutangi: I would not say we are or we are not doing the same job. But then in my judgment and the judgment of the presidency, NCD has been around for a long while and if civic education has been part of their portfolio, then where is the curriculum or the syllabus that they have for the teaching of civic education? That’s a question one might raise.
Even in the cross cutting issues, there are several areas that we are engaging, for instance the issue of cultism and clique violence. NCD has been around for the longest time but since we have been here for the relatively short time, we have been able to engage these young people for us to see reason to work together.
There are other cross cutting issues, for instance the issue around children. NCD has been around for the longest time, but when we were preparing for the commemoration of the Convention of the Rights of the Child, the responsibility was ours to work with young people to be expressive of the issues that they think that affect them. We worked all right through this country, we did an exhibition of the young people’s idea through an arts exhibition.
Statistics Sierra Leone put out the MICS 6 report. It’s been doing this over time when NCD has been around. But again, it was us who decided to take that voluminous document to break it down into chunks and take it out there to our people so that they can understand it.
In addition to the role the government and duty bearers have to them, they also as citizens have responsibility to better their situation.
In my view, civic education is not about democracy alone. Even by their name, the National Commission for Democracy, their focus has been on voter education, or perhaps on other things that have to do about rights around democracy. We have more holistic approach to these things. We are talking about citizens’ rights to themselves, responsibilities to their communities and the state’s responsibilities to those citizens, and to encourage the citizens to take active actions to better their situations.
So yes, I don’t see were the duplication of efforts are as it relates to NCD.
We invited them to our proghrammes, but they are one of the organozations that didn’t follow up with us. But again, they might have their own roles. Government might decide that they still have a role to play. But as it is now, what we are doing is trying to create a daylight between what they are doing and what we are doing.
Politico: You mentioned one thing at least which stands out. Pursuing the state’s responsibilities to its citizens. You have said a lot about what you will do in terms of educating the people. But the state itself taking care of its responsibilities, how does that fit into all this?
Totangi: We are caught up between the state and its citizens as a matter of fact. We are in the process of providing the knowledge for the people of this country. The idea is for the young people and even for other citizens to understand clearly that in addition to what they expect government to do for them, there are some things that they should do for themselves. But they can better do it if they organize themselves and if they know what are the things that they expect government to do for them.
It is not for us to hold government responsible. It’s for the citizens to hold their government responsible. What we are doing is providing information to the people of this country and we are also going to be guiding them to develop the critical skills that are required for them to hold their state responsible.
That’s the reason why the state has committed itself to open government.
Politico: One very important end result of your work would be a society that is not only informed but also cohesive. And this is not possible withhout the participation of everybody. And earlier you mentioned that some politicians had fallen out along the way. Who are these?
Totangi: In the first place, the ruling Sierra Leone People’s Party (SLPP) and the main opposition have not given us much of their cooperation. They have not participated very well. Initially, the representative of the C4C started well with us. But for some reason he has been missing. And the last time I heard from him he said he had so many things to do.
So those three political parties - SLPP, APC, predominantly have not cooperated. And so has the C4C fizzled out. But we have the NGC fully supportive and other institutions, including the army. They are all part of this.
But since the appointment of a new PPRC chairman, he has been very cooperative. And because he has access to all these political parties, we are going to use the PPRC as a conduit to reach out to those political parties, because reaching out to them is very significant in our view.
Politics is always the spark point of all of the conflicts and divisiveness in our society. We have our finger on that. And together with the UNESCO Commission, which is also working on issues of peace, and the National Youth Commission, we want to use PPRC as a conduit on which to engage political parties and their young people, for them to understand that even them, the political leaders, should not be using those young people to commit violence.
Politico: It sounded interesting – shocking, actually, that the SLPP itself is not cooperating. You would not expect that it was the opposition that wasn’t cooperating. Why do you think this is so?
Totangi: That is a question we will leave to the leadership of the SLPP and the other political parties. From the outset, when I proposed the steering committee composition, I made it a lean one because I was also scared that we may not have everybody cooperating and even forming a quorum would be an issue.
For an organization starting this fresh, you need to hold constant meetings in order to find your footing. We took it to the president and he said no, we had to make it all inclusive, so that people will know that this is not just another institution to serve his political ambition.
And so we thought that was a very lofty idea. We started very well. But again we don’t have much money to give to everybody that is coming as transport allowance or to throw a big launch for everybody. This is about commitment and those people who have shown commitment are still committed because they believe in what we are doing. I don’t know what that is it, but sometimes people are used to emolument. But I am not a man given to that much. And maybe I have to learn from that, going forward.
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