This, in spite of the mess we daily see local government chieftains make of local council funds resulting in their being, individually, richer than their respective councils and with no meaningful impact on the lives of the communities that make up the councils.
First, Re: SENATORS CALL FOR SACK OF MINISTERS:
- Then what should happen to the Senators, if not simply guillotine them?
They deserve to suffer the worst fate possible, given their dismal level of competence, performance and integrity- Ayo Omowumi.
- Saraki should address cost of governance which is not sustainable with, or without recession by removing the beam in his, and his colleagues’ eyes. The senate should lead in adjusting to these austere times. – Okan Adetunmbi.
- Fascinating, seeing alleged treasury looters knocking the anti-corruption war, claiming its sweeping approach was scaring investors away. Will these people, ever learn, purge themselves, disgorge all they have allegedly stolen and help Nigeria out of recession?
Given the huge misuse to which all Nigerian military Heads of State had put local governments during their time, especially during the administration of the ‘allocation snatcher’, it would have tantamount to a Pauline conversion to see President Muhammadu Buhari do anything other than endorse local government autonomy. I had read, and casually dismissed his endorsement until something else brought me back to the need to urge him to re consider his position. That was the short birthday lecture Dr Olusegun Mimiko, the Ondo State governor, gave this past Monday, at the 70th birthday celebration of Chief Ishola Filani. Brilliant, tactical and, ever calculating, reasons the APC should waste no further time in putting its house in order ahead of the Ondo State governorship election, Mimiko gave an extremely poignant lecture, devoted mostly to restructuring but with emphasis on the place of local governments in a federal system. Given their historic misuse as earlier referred to, it should not be a surprise that all manner of potentates have grown around local governments, feeding fat and, cornering to themselves and their cronies, huge portions of the funds coming in from the federation account. So massive is the level of corruption in local governments that during the administration of Dr Kayode Fayemi as Governor of Ekiti State, a traumatised elder statesman told me about how certain categories of local government officials in the state were not only making a monthly contribution of not less than N1million, but owned – as at the time- most of the hotels and gas stations in Ado-Ekiti, the state capital, which information I promptly passed on to the governor and who, in turn quickly fast tracked his government’s introduction of the e-payment system to check mate this mother of all corruption.
Governor Mimiko was categorical in denouncing federal involvement in a matter that should, absolutely, be a state affair, drawing attention to how military Heads of State deliberately gifted the north an abysmally disproportionate number of local governments, using such nebulous parameters as some sterile land mass. To buttress his point, he cited the specific case of Kano State which, even after Jigawa State had been carved out of it , still dwarfed Lagos State, three or four times, in the number of local governments. You only have to mentally calculate how much money goes to each state monthly from the federation account, to fully appreciate the wicked, but deliberate intent of that treacherous act. However, in order not to get subsumed in the muddle of present day Nigerian politics, let me very quickly excuse Governor Mimiko and invite, far from the great beyond, for further elucidation on this matter, unarguably Nigeria’s foremost political commentator ever: the evergreen Uncle Bola Ige, legal luminary and former governor of Oyo State who wrote , mutatis mutandis, on what he captioned: “Man -Made Avoidable Local Government Troubles”, in his column in The Sunday Tribune of 27 April, 1996 from which I shall quote at some length.
Wrote Chief Ige, “anyone who has a good knowledge of the local government system, its history, theory and practice, not only in Nigeria but also in civilised countries, cannot be surprised at what is happening in various parts of the country since the Federal Military Government announced the “creation”of new local government areas. I personally have been shocked and pained by the violence that has been unleashed in some places and I am apprehensive that the tinder box is waiting to be ignited in some places where uneasy calm exists. There are modalities that govern local government systems all over the civilised world. The first is that a local government must be truly government at local level. In other words, the people of a given area must be allowed to come together, of their own accord, and in a spirit of agreeing to some sort of social contract, to run their local affairs. The community must of course be easily identifiable – usually they must be people of the same stock, or citizens who inhabit a town, or a village or a quarter as existed both during the colonial times and when we had regions. That was also what happened when I was governor of the old Oyo State.
Local government system was based on emirates where they existed or administrative units where there were no emirates in the north; in the west, it was based on the combination of the Obaship system and innate democratic inclinations of the peoples of Western Nigeria; in the East where the people were largely republican, the local government system was based on the clan. Unfortunately, the Murtala-Obasanjo Federal Military Government began the nonsense that has remained with us. Pretending that they wanted a better local government administration, they set up a Commission, headed by Alhaji Ibrahim Dasuki. In my opinion, the recommendations of that commission were the worst disaster to have happened to local government system in Nigeria. For instance, it was from there that the idea of uniformity in size, scope and administration was introduced. I confess that I suspected a hidden agenda in the recommendations: in order to strengthen the administrative stranglehold of the emirates, all of Nigeria was advised to base its local government system on defined populations and elaborate administrative system. Also, the military wanted to be able to manipulate the local governments, and ipso facto, the entire country. Fortunately, it did not work, nor will it ever work.
Concluding, the legal luminary wrote: “In a federal set-up, the federal government must have nothing to do with the creation or running of local governments. Nigeria is the only federation in the whole world where the federal government decides how, where, and when a local government council must run. In all civilised countries, and in all democratic countries, it is the state or provincial or regional government that legislates on local government.” As solution to the unending problems of local governments in Nigeria, “the federal government must hands off local government affairs. State governments should formulate guidelines for the setting up of local government councils. They must be of universal application and not tinkered with. Once any community satisfies the criteria in those guidelines, they should have their own council. What a people or community always want is a community of interests-not handouts by the authorities. Only then shall we be saved from man-made avoidable local government troubles.”
It will be describing President Buhari’s endorsement very mildly, indeed, to suggest that it is a huge surprise that a whole 20 years after Chief Ige made those Socratic suggestions, the president comes round, with his endorsement of local government council autonomy, obviously expressing his preference to have local councils set up as competitors with state governments which, the world over, has full and undiminished authority over them. This, in spite of the mess we daily see local government chieftains make of local council funds resulting in their being, individually, richer than their respective councils and with no meaningful impact on the lives of the communities that make up the councils. In voicing this endorsement, President Buhari has the good fortune that, as my co-columnist, Olakunle Abimbola, recently put it: his ‘sheer moral authority, powered by his unchallenged integrity’ to thank, as that forbids us from accusing him of political opportunism as he made the remarks while receiving the leadership of the Association of Local Governments in Nigeria (ALGON), one of those bodies that have perennially, unduly, profited from our wayward local government system even as the communities atrophy.
Credit: Femi Orebe, Ekiti Forum