Maureen Okpe
The European Union Agent for Citizenship Transformation (EU-ACT) has expressed worry over the poor compliance of Civil Society Organizations (CSOs) to regulatory frameworks, attributing this to a lack of the requisite knowledge and information on regulations.
Component II Manager EU-ACT, Idem Udoekong, submitted Monday, in Abuja, during a two-day training for CSO’s Regulatory Framework and Compliance organized by the British Council National Technical Committee on Civil Society Self Regulation.
Udoekong noted the importance of compliance with regulatory frameworks, stressing that it is paramount to sustain and strengthen of CSOs to keep them out of trouble.
According to him, the non-compliance with regulations and frameworks has its consequences which could lead to abuse and undignified status, adding that CSOs must endeavour to get themselves conversant with these ethics to enable a more credible system.
“If you do not comply with the law, it may create room for abuse of the system. Regulations help credibility in an organisation and just as they always advocate for change and reform they also need to be credible enough to fight the cause as research shows low compliance of CSOs to relevant.
“This low compliance is because they do not understand what they have to do. For example, filing annual returns for companies in allied matters act. We expect them to have better knowledge of the law and comply the more, we want to see the level of compliance go up as a result of this training, which will be ten rounds of training around marked states, then the state’s networks,” he said.
Recall that in March 2021, the outcome of a survey conducted by the EU-ACT programme emphasised the need to establish the current levels of compliance with legal frameworks amongst its supported CSOs/Networks/CBOs in the FCT, Lagos, Sokoto, Kano, Rivers, Edo, Adamawa, Enugu, Plateau and Borno States.
The EU-ACT, survey findings, indicated that out of the 119 CSOs’ responses that were processed, less than a third of the CSOs were compliant with the Company Allied Matters Act, less than 10% of the CSOs were fully tax compliant and only 14% of the CSOs were SCUML compliant.
Earlier, A Professor of Law and Lead Resource Person, Adedeji Adekunle in his address lamented that studies from 2021 show low compliance adding, compliance to regulation is knowledge-driven, as some organisations do not know what to do per time.
Adekunle regretted that pure ignorance is a major factor even as it can not be excused, as regulations are dynamic and constantly.
“These regulations are dynamic and most of the stakeholders give up, many CSO, just come to execute and implement a thing and that’s it, functioning for just a year or two and then pack up. They are rules and laws that should guide operation.
“This training is to ensure that knowledge is shared and capacities are built, to ensure understanding and help the government to know the organisation is still in practice and not in extinction.”
On his part, Terver Ayua Special Assistant Registrar General, Corporate Affairs Commission (CAC), stated the need to deepen the knowledge on compliance and how it will benefit the regulator and those who are regulated.
While noting that, so far the compliance level is encouraging even though cannot be rated in percentage but more education needs to be done.
“Some of these CSOs are not shying from compliance but sometimes they have issues on how best it can be achieved, so the office of the CAC is here to throw more light on how it can be done seamlessly as registration is a two-way traffic, we expect that entities should comply with requirements of the registration as this is the way the commission can regulate CSO.”
One of the participants, James Ugochukwu of the African Centre for Entrepreneurship Information and Development, said the CSOs complement activities of the government, thus, the over-regulation of the space will be shutting doors to more people engaging in Civil activities.
Ugochukwu said, “persons come into CSOs to help solve a concern that people suffer. What we expect the government to do is to make the space safer for more persons to engage not to create stringent laws. These laws are shrinking the CSO’s space, these laws most times do not work positively. They are over-regulating the activities of the CSOs,” he said.