Local councils in Nigeria will remain ineffective because it is incongruent with federal democracy, and fashioned in favour of the unitary military government that crafted the 1999 Constitution.
Foremost public administration scholar, Professor Ladipo Adamolekun, who made this assertion, however, demanded that Section 7 of the Constitution be expunged, except its first part, which stated: “The system of local government by democratically-elected local government councils is, under this Constitution, guaranteed.”
Adamolekun, in a piece entitled: ‘Local governments in Nigeria’s federal democracy’, disclosed that the 1976 Local Government Reform was applauded by many Nigerians because of the promise that it would be the first step towards the return to democratic civilian rule and partly because of its emphasis on the promotion of rapid socio-economic development at the grassroots level.
He noted that while it was agreed that it should be included in the 1979 Constitution, “no attention was paid to the incongruity of maintaining local councils that were consistent with a unitary military government for successive governments expected to operate within a federal democracy where federal and state governments could be controlled by different political parties, whose views on local councils could diverge in significant respects.”
The former lead public sector management specialist at the World Bank also faulted the skewed manner in which the military government increased the number of local councils from 301 in 1985 to 774 by 1999, ostensibly in response to popular demand.
“In reality, there was always not-so-hidden geo-political arithmetic in the creation of new local councils. The result is a skewed distribution of the current 774 councils among states and geopolitical zones,” he asserted.
While calling for the removal of the number of local councils from the Constitution, he said the amended Constitution should recognise the states alone as the federating units of Nigeria, and local councils as sub-jurisdictions of state governments.
To him, this was the consensus at the 2014 confab and shared by many opinion leaders who expressed views on the subject since 1999.
The former Dean, Faculty of Administration, Obafemi Awolowo University (OAU), Ile Ife, also noted that his position conformed with the July 2014 decision of the Supreme Court that, “no state governor has the power to remove a democratically-elected local council official.”
He said, “Regarding public revenue allocation, the allocation for local councils from the Federation Account should be to the states as sensibly recommended by the 2014 confab. However, instead of the prevailing practice of sharing the percentage of the Federation Account due to local councils among the 774, the amount should be shared among the 36 states and the Federal Capital Territory (FCT). The formula for sharing could be based on equality, population and land area.”
