The State website, has useful links to various Ward
Contact Persons that work under the Rescue Agenda
of the State Government. Apart from the State
Education Ministry, weblinks to the other State
Ministries are not functional. We saw an interesting
innovation in Taraba state were information is
provided on compliance levels for asset declaration.
In 2015, 875 Civil Servants between Grade Level 12 –
17 declared their assets in the State. Likewise, in
2014, 68 Political Office holders declared their assets
in the State.
We do not see evidence of stakeholder involvement in
developing and implementing the Rescue Agenda. We
do not see the budget of the state or the local
governments on the website. Auditor General’s
annual audit report is not available online. After
multiple search, we do not see a website for the
State House of Assembly.
Under the state employee accountability system, we
do not see any evidence of a performance
management system shared with citizens of the
state. There is no information on stated annual goals
and level of implementation. We do not see an active
strategy for a citizen reporting mechanism, social
media presence is low as the Facebook page has
1,654 likes and no official twitter handle.  There is no
call centre as the only contact number is a cell phone
number on the webpage. No evidence of basic tasks
that can be performed online, there is no
advertisement of vacancies and tenders on the state
website. We do not know if any public recruitment
had been done recently and what the outcomes were.
The state stakeholder engagement strategy is not
obvious from the website. Owing to the rural nature
of the state it is possible that the government has a
stakeholder engagement plan suited for the state but
that is not reported on the website. We do not see
any evidence that the government engaged
stakeholders in developing the state long-term plan.
There is no report about any platform dedicated to
sharing state programs and status with citizens.
State evaluation mechanism appears to be lacking in
Taraba State as no information is provided on
budget performance on the state website. We do not
see ongoing projects in the state and the stages of
delivery against stated delivery time. We do not see
evidence of reward or sanction against performance
or non-performance.
Taraba State shows great promise in its effort to be a
transparent state but more work needs to be done to
build capabilities within the state to become a truly
modern agriculture and food processing state
attracting local and global capital. The state should
look into how investors can transact with the state
online. Improving the perception of the state as a
business friendly, transparent and citizen engaged
location would boost the plan of making it one of the
two top economies in the North East. To achieve that
Taraba needs to build new competencies and
deliberately embrace ICT.