Nigerian Delegation Found Great Value at ICGFM

The following e-mail was received by Nina Powell.

Dear Nina,

First of all I am glad to inform you on behalf of our delegation that we arrived Kano safely on Monday,May
26 2008 without any incident but full of satisfaction about the conference and fond memory of the sunshine
city of Miami which will linger in our memory for a long time to come.

Secondly and more importantly,we wish to express our profound gratitude and appreciation to you and your
wonderful staff for doing everything possible to ensure our safe arrival to Miami,comfort and
participation in the 2008 conference.

As I stated earlier,as a subnational government in the federation of Nigeria,we are also confronted with many
challenges like other nations in the developing world:

• the challenges of integrity in governance
• the challenges of meeting the MDG
• the challenges of rapid and sustainable development
• the challenges of uor elected leaders to deliver ontheir promise
• the challenges of a virile civil workforce to deliver services efficiently and effectively
• the challenges of public financial management reforms
• the challenges of 'watchdog' agencies to ensure transparency and accountability in governance
• the challenges of effective public participation to ensure effective governance
• the challenges of the media and other civil societiesto ensure effective governance
• the challenges of partnership with the private sector for development and
• the challenges of support of our development partners

These daunting challenges informed the decision of our state government to approve our participation in the
conference to afford us the opportunity of listening to practitioners,learn from others and on return, to continue with our onward march to the future development of our state and local govenments with new ideas as a learning process.

I must state that we are doing something within available resouces to address almost all of these daunting challenges, Jesse Hughes can bear me witness,but I must aso confess that much needs to be done.

So we looked forward to solutions which have been applied elsewhere,which have been proved by experience, sufficiently documented,which can be shared and used by us and which can be sustained legally, politically, socially, financially, institutionally and strategically.

Against this background,it is the view of our delegation that our participation is a huge success and a step in the right direction given the top notch presentations and the extremely beneficial interactions with other delegates and peers while the conference lasted.

We also thank you most sincerely for finding time despite your tight schedule to not only take us round the Miami city hall but arranged a meeting with a top city official which has proved extremely beneficial to the elected local government chairmen(mayors) in our delegation.

On a personal note I thank you and the ICGFM for the recognition and the token gift which is a thing of
pride to me and my family. Incidentally I have no idea what the recognition is for as I honestly did not hear
the citation very well.Could you kindly explain?

Kindly permit me to end with the little spanish I picked up while in Miami-

MUCHO GRACIAS AND ADIOS AMIGO

Ali Ben Musa