Hon. Umar Kassim Ibrahim is a trustee of the Association of Local Government of Nigeria (ALGON). The engineer and one time chairman of Biu LG Council in this interview with AMINA ALHASSAN AHMAN, stressed the need to make local governments autonomous, this, he said would ensure that development comes to the local governments. Excerpts:
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As the chairman, committee on ALGON, can you tell us some of the challenges that have hindered ALGON from being able to manage the grassroots very well in the past?
I wouldn’t say they have not been able to manage the grassroots very well. There are some local governments where you see real development, where they have done very well but generally, I used to be the chairman of a local government and we had the opportunity to develop our various local government areas because we had the constitution strictly followed and were given a free hand. Funds were directly allocated to us and we operated the funds the way they came. But since after our first 3-year tenure, there were a lot of interruptions from the government of the state. Governors realised they had so much power over the chairmen and that made them introduce certain measures as if LGs were appendices to the state and not a tier. So, most of the governors took over the funds meant for them LGs and operated it at will. Whatever they desired to give the local government is what we worked with. At that point, it became difficult because various forms of corruption had set in. Whatever the governors gave the chairmen was meant to be shared and not for development and most of the time, the money given them was labelled overheads and other titles with which one could not make any meaningful development. Most local governments just go to get whatever they can and don’t have any say. In a certain state, I was made to understand they were asked to sign for some money that eventually was not given to them, and in some cases, half of the money would be given to them. These are some of the problems the local governments have encountered since the inception of this new dispensation. ALGON has tried its best in its own capacity as an umbrella organisation in order to challenge this, but because the governors have been removing LG chairmen with impunity, some of the LG chairmen are in court challenging this. I think there is the need to really interpret the position of local governments from the Supreme Court.
Since development matters fall back to the local government chairmen what measures is ALGON taking to restore some of the insanities that has troubled the local governments in the past?
It boils down to one thing. Everything we need to do boils down to money. How much capacity do you have to work with because you have to work with something and the problem we are having at ALGON is that we have tried to make sure that the local government is given autonomy. The autonomy is somehow taken over by section 7 of the constitution, where it gives so much power to the state governors to dissolve local governments and the state Assemblies to determine how the functions of the local government should be. The states are being run on their own, no federal legislation interrupts states from running the state, but in the case of local governments, the state legislation can interrupt its operation. We have met the National Assembly to amend that section of the constitution; unfortunately we did not work hard or capacity was not much, we did not work hard to make that particular bill go through where we can push it so that we can really have autonomy, once we have our autonomy and we can control funds at the local government level, things will begin fall in place.
Do you think autonomy would deliver security at the local level?
You don’t give someone power without measures to checkmate it; you must manage such powers with rules and regulations. Just like the states; there are oversight functions of the state Houses of Assembly, it is expected that there should be oversight functions of the councilors at the local government level but unfortunately, they don’t operate. The councilors at the local government level don’t do any thing. To me, there should not be councilors at the local government because they don’t do anything. The constitution is there, yes, they have oversight but what are they over sighting for, when the functions have been taken by the state house of assembly? So the state is like running the local governments. There must be machinery put in place for the local governments to operate; now they are operating at the mercy of the state. When you are operating at the mercy of someone, I don’t think you will have the capacity to really work.
Do you think the federal government is handling with LGs with an iron fist failed because the they had failed in the past or they are doing it to deprive them of their rights to lead?
If you say any government or local government is failing, what are you doing to make it work? I think they are wielding so much power everywhere from state to federal government. What have they done to make the local governments work? The only thing that has been done is to embezzle all the local government funds. There are no sanctions put in place to punish or check those who have not lived up to expectation. If you put some control measures in place you will see development and you will find that all these attractions for cities will not be there anymore. People run to the cities because there are no activities happening at their end. Some states, however, have given a lot to make their local governments work, for example Kano State under Shekarau who gave so much attention to local governments and also the leverage to work and that in turn made the whole state look like it was working.
A lot of the violence we see today is caused mostly by people who are aggrieved because of conditions they have found themselves in and it’s actually being traced to the lack of development at the grassroots level. Do you think that if the local governments were given the privilege to become autonomous they wouldn’t fail us?
No, because there will be checks and balances to ensure that these things are done. Education and primary health care are within the province of the local government, yet establishments like the UBE first gets to the states and they distribute it the way they like and in the end even the staffing of the primary schools is controlled by states; they employ and sack. This is constitutionally under the LG, but because a lot of funds come in from there, the states want to control and take a large chunk out of it. The operation of the LG must live by the allocation of the federation and even in most states, the constitutional responsibilities are bestowed on them by the constitution-10 per cent of the revenue generated by states are supposed to be split by the LGs; this is not done and that is the basis of joint allocation which affects LGs so much.
The joint allocation was not meant to shortchange the LG, it was meant to improve them; funds that come from the federation cannot be directly taken to the LGs because there are other funds that are supposed to be redistributed in the states, so it comes to the states, the states are then supposed to add more money to the allocation and give it the LGs not that they should take the money and say, ‘we have a project and have bought cars for LGs whether they like it or not.
I heard of one particular LG chairman who was promptly removed for ‘challenging’ the governor in one of the northern states because he said that a jeep was not his priority; these jeeps were purchased at about N10m each so he said, ‘sir, I wouldn’t mind my N10m being used to provide boreholes to give water to my people,” amd for that he was removed.
For the past four years some states have been run without LG chairmen and councilors. Do you think that contributed to some of the problems of those states?
Of course, as I said earlier, the trend in the whole world is decentralisation. People want to have a say in what government is doing. If these things are not brought to them at their feet, the way they can control and participate, how would there be improvement and development?
You mentioned earlier that a Bill is before the National Assembly and nothing has been done yet. Are you still pursuing this?
Yes, we are still asking the National Assembly to amend that aspect of the constitution to give autonomy to the LGs so that they can operate and so that the people who elected them can control them. ?