Guardian Nigeria
Good morning, Mr President. This morning, I address the local government question in broad terms with the knowledge that many analysts have concentrated on the autonomy aspect.
In doing so, I will be didactic for you to comprehend the matter and lead rightly. Unfortunately, many of the legislators fail to understand the latent function of the local government debate in the rush to engross laws obviously in quest of the elusive autonomy for local government.
To appreciate the politics of local government in Nigeria, three definitional contexts should be sketched. One, what is federalism or a federation? Two, what is local government? And three, what is local government autonomy? Federalism is a covenanted state device by people to establish social order with clearly defined structures of power distribution.
Structures are not apriori but post-hoc to the federal concept. Local government as a subsidiary entity brings government to the people at the local level. It is an administrative arrangement, not a tier of the state.
Therefrom is the issue of autonomy. The latter amounts to functional independence of the local government, concerning constitutionally guaranteed functions. In a proper federation, it ought to be a creation of the region or state party to the federal covenant. Today, the prevailing local structures (774 local governments) in Nigeria are the arbitrary creation of the military out of its hegemonic, whimsical, patronising, and acquisitive mentality.
The subjective political act serves at least two main purposes, namely, atomisation of the federal structure to a unitary mode amenable to hegemonic control of the Nigerian state, and primitive accumulation of state resources through the direct allocation to the local government.
Peoples are the defining element of federalism who, after the covenant, constitute a federation. A federation may be engendered by various factors such as linguistic and historical disparities, common geographical disadvantages, and common threats to survival among others.
Any, or, a combination of these factors may compel the need to live together in one political community with definitive distribution of power. It is for this reason that federalism is sometimes defined as an institutional bargain, ala William Riker, who argued that federalism is about a bargain, and is its sustaining logic.
The Nigerian constitutional history ran along a federal framework based on the dominant nationalities with expressed concern for the minorities which the Willinck Commission of 1957 sought to address. With the truncation of the federal structure in substance by the military, the country’s political direction has galloped along a unitary trajectory and deliberate atomisation of the federal essentiality of the Nigerian state through the arbitrary creation of local governments to the point of saturation.
The matter is that the military that was run by regional hegemons arbitrarily created local governments as a third of the state, not the government, possibly out of ignorance of its distinction. Political actors, conscious of the power politics in the prevailing civil dispensation are seeking to reify it as a tier of the state, which ought to ring the alarm bell of the federalists in the National Assembly and the general public. A federation is made up of peoples. Federation is logically a two-tier structure from a contractarian perspective that Monsieur Proudhon espoused in his conception of federalism.
The people coming together in search of a common social order will into existence a centre that shares power with the component units. Hence, the aptness of K. C. Wheare’s famous definition of federalism, that is, “the method of dividing power so that general and regional governments are each within a sphere coordinate and independent.”
Therefore, to bring government close to the people at the local levels, regions, party to the federal covenant may create the desired number of local governments. Since Nigeria’s politics has oscillated along the spectrum of sharing oil money, not the creation of wealth, local government has become a convenient vehicle for taking more shares of federally generated resources. What logic justifies Kano having 44 local governments more than Lagos with 20 local governments? It can only be justified by Carl Friedrich’s definitional aberration that sees federalism as a process, and thus dynamic.
The autonomisation of the existing local governments is not so much about the abuse of local government funds by state governments, permitted by the state-local government joint account, where allocation to local government is domiciled, rather it is about reifying the arbitrary creations of the military for cheating on the federal resource pool. Little wonder that local governments across the country, with a few exceptions, merely exist only in the constitution without physical manifestation.
Mr. President, the way to go is the path of fiscal federalism. In the short term, the allocation of revenue should be between the centre and the component states. The components must decide the number of local governments they desire, constitutionalise their powers and function, and the percentage of funds the state will allocate to them in its yearly budget.
Unfortunately, those who created the arbitrary structures had disingenuously sought to autonomise the local government using the National Financial Intelligence Unit (NFIU) to rationalise cession of financial autonomy to the local governments in the country. The creation of NFIU had nothing to do with the financial autonomy of local government; it is essentially a mission creep. NFIU is a received policy from the agencies of global governance, the notorious World Bank and IMF, which instructed countries to establish financial units as a way of checkmating terrorist funding after the terrorist attacks on the United States on September 11, 2001.
Mr. President, the way out is the proper constitution of our federation. Federally generated resources should be shared between the centre and the units, without the local governments that fall within the residual jurisdiction of the state. The state should have control over its resources, with an agreed percentage going to the centre. The state should be at liberty to create local government structures based on its objective reality. Local government can only be autonomous to the extent allowed by its constituting act in the state.
