Those who opposed to local government autonomy do have good reasons too. They argue that the local government is not technically a third tier of government. It is merely a politico-administrative province of the state governments. It is the responsibility of each state government. Ideally, a state government should decide the form and the system of local government best suited to its political and administrative needs.
The generals created a constitutional problem since 1979 when they decided to define states by the composition of their local government areas. See Part I of the first schedule to the constitution. This has been used to argue, incorrectly, that states are not empowered by the constitution to create local governments because doing so would require a constitutional amendment. They argue that a newly created local government area is perfected only when the schedule is amended and it is listed therein among the local governments in the state that created it.
This argument did not arise in the second republic. Governors felt free to create and some of them created new local government areas and did not have to perfect them through a constitutional amendment. It became a problem under Obasanjo. He did not want states to create more local government areas. As far as he was concerned, more local government areas would not necessarily make good and responsible governance. They would be a drain on the national coffers. I am equally so persuaded.
Obasanjo brought states that defied him to their knees by withholding their local government funds. He, of course, acted illegally. The Supreme Court said so when the Lagos State Government took the matter before the apex court. The president did not budge. The states gave in by downgrading the new local government areas into development areas. The change of title satisfied Obasanjo but it did not cure the legal defect. The development areas function fully as local governments, not as subordinates to the local government areas listed in the first schedule.
The irony was lost on Obasanjo. And so, we have the current situation in which some states have two sets of governments at the local level: local government areas and development areas. Perhaps we need to amend the constitution to legitimize this obvious oddity.
We have been running around the question: What do we do with the local government system? The question prompted at least two major studies in the past. One was the Ibrahim Dasuki committee set up by the Obasanjo administration in 1976; the other was the committee set up by the Babangida administration in the eighties. Many of the reforms introduced on the strength of the recommendations of these committees have been rolled back.
Under the Babangida reforms, for instance, the local government became a third tier of government. It received its statutory share from the federation account directly from sources, not through the state governments. The reforms abolished the ministry for local governments and chieftaincy affairs. Or more correctly, it downgraded it to a division in the governor’s office. It has since been rolled back.
The Mantu committee, perhaps reading Obasanjo’s mindset, offered its most comprehensive proposed constitutional amendments on the local government system. It wanted local governments to a) receive their fund directly from the office of the accountant-general of the federation, b) the auditor-general of the federation to audit the accounts of the local governments and c) INEC, not the so-called state independent electoral commissions, to conduct local government elections. These and its other proposals on the local government system would have made the local government a full federal responsibility. It would have amounted to an extreme but wrong solution to a simple administrative problem.
The various reforms have muddled the concept of the local government system. We cannot see our way clearly out of this muddle any more. The more we try, the more we splash in the mud. It is not difficult to appreciate the anger of those who feel that it is wrong to fund the local governments from the federation account and allow the state governors to do as they wish with them – including the stealing of their fund and rendering them worthless as a system of government.
Although we do not seem to be entirely persuaded that the local government should be the third tier of government, its current structure makes it a de facto third tier of government. Federal and state government structures are duplicated at the local government level: an executive arm headed by an executive local government chairman and a unicameral legislature headed by the speaker. Only one thing is missing: the judiciary as the third arm of the local government. The local government stands on two legs instead of three.
Do we need three tiers of government? We have been mealy-mouthed about this question. Nigeria has 811 governments. If you add the development areas that fully function as local governments, we probably have more than 900 governments – the largest in the world. That is a huge burden on the federation account. You can see why federal, state and local governments do no more than service recurrent expenditure. Development suffers at the three tiers of government.
I think it is foolish to push for a third tier of government using the euphemism of local government autonomy. Let us roll back and put the local government system and its place in our system of government in proper perspective. The colonial authorities conceived the NA system as essentially a grassroots system of government. They did not think of it as a tier of government. They thought of it as an administrative unit of the regional governments, hence the full participation of traditional rulers in the NA administration.
The NA enjoyed a measure of autonomy, thanks to the sensible devolution of powers to them by the regional governments. It is to be noted that although the regional governments shared in the concept and the philosophy of the native authority system, there was no uniformity in its administration.
In the Northern Region, each NA set up and fully funded its own police force and its own prison service. They operated within defined parameters set by the regional government. There was, therefore, no uniformity in the functions of the native authorities or in their relationship with the regional governments. Each NA had enough latitude to generate its own revenue and use it to service itself. None of them went to the regional headquarters at the end of each month for a monthly hand out from the regional government. None received one penny from the federation account. A fully functional system that served the needs of each regional government and its people has been rendered incompetent and almost useless, thanks to the endless experiments by the generals.
It is not going to be easy to roll back to the days of the native authorities unless we demonstrate the will to do so. The immediate problem is that the local government made the grade as a numbered item in the revenue allocation formula. Under the current system, the more local governments a state has, the more money it collects from the federation account. This is the singular motivation for the eagerness of state governors to create more local government areas as soon as the country returned to civil rule in 1999. Had Obasanjo allowed them, we probably would have close to 2,000 local government areas in the country today. States will fight to retain the current system because it puts more money in their coffers – and thence into the pockets of their excellences.
But rolling back is the only sensible way to go. Autonomy amounts to dancing around the problem. Let us give the local governments back to the states. Let each state decide the form and the system of its local government. We do not need uniformity in local government administration in the country. Each state should decide what would best work for it. If a state government decides not to retain the current system of wastage, it should feel free to throw it out. If a state feels it does not want local government elections, it should feel free to devise what it believes will work for it. Let each state determine the number of the local government it can reasonably fund.
Constitutional amendments are about fundamental and even at times radical changes forced on a country by contemporary political and other exigencies. The national assembly should have the courage and the moral compunction to shake the system and help to constitutionally pull this country from the anomaly of a federal system of government hobbled by a unitary system of governance. Cosmetic constitutional amendments merely tease the system and generate only motion, not movement. (Concluded)
