The Speaker of the House of Representatives, Rt. Honourable Yakubu Dogara, speaks with journalists on the local government system in the country and the efforts being made by the National Assembly to halt the trend of state governors undermining democracy at the grass roots. MOSES ALAO brings excerpts:
IN your estimation, is local government administration on course in Nigeria?
As far as I am concerned, I do think that the issue of local government administration, especially how effectively they are run, should not just be left to any authority or person.
If I were to answer your question straight forward, I will tell you that it is not working and the reason is very simple. All the local governments in the country are specified in the first schedule of the 1979 Constitution. The work they do or the functions assigned to the local government councils are also specified in the fourth schedule of the constitution. But above that, section 7 of the constitution is very instructive, it talks about the system of local government must be democratically elected, it is guaranteed under the 1979 constitution. So, if we start from section 7 of the constitution, how many local governments will you say have executives that were democratically elected? How many of those councils do you see are performing the responsibilities assigned to them under the 4th schedule of the 1979 constitution? The answer is quite obvious, and it is a system that is in crisis. Since 1999 when we had this latest advent of politics, I don’t want to go back to the days of military regime, you will attest to the fact that there is hardly any local government that has lived up to its constitutional mandate and the reasons are quite obvious.
Nigerians have continued to adduce the reason local government administration has been dysfunctional to the interference from the state governments. What is your take on this?
Yes. You are quite right. I will say really that it is by design of the constitution. The constitution makers, those who drafted the 1999 constitution actually muddled up a lot of things with regards to running of local governments. I do not know what model they adopted really, because you look at all the federations in law, in nations that are described as federal republics, countries like Brazil, for instance, India, the United States, there appears to be a model that they are following but I don’t know what model the framers of the 1999 constitution wanted to promote in Nigeria.
Now, when we talk about independence of local government councils in Nigeria, I don’t know whether it is achievable, whether we should talk about certain semi-autonomy or some kind of semi-independence. Because when you are talking about independence of local government councils such as is practised in India, to a larger extent, in the United States of America and in Brazil, to some extent, they have a democratically elected council, a democratically elected council legislature. You have even council courts; you have council police; you have councils that are directly in charge of recruiting their personnel and disciplining them. You have councils that are in charge of resources that come into the council and appropriate them because they have legislators. The chairmen operate as the executive and they can be impeached if they go against certain rules and so, they are completely independent and as such, they deliver on mandates that are given to them. But in Nigeria, that was not the model that was promoted by the framers of the 1999 constitution when they talked about things like joint accounts for instance.
The governor will sit in the state executive meeting and they will come up with a resolution that they have sacked an elected council executive and then they appoint council caretaker committees. And to be candid, that is a gross violation of the constitution. I don’t know if the framers were able to anticipate that that may likely be the situation, that most of the state governors will violate the powers that were assigned to the states with respect to local governments under the constitution.
That has become the norm rather than the exception, where a majority of the councils in Nigeria, even as we speak in this era of change and the promise APC made, you will be surprised that a majority of the area councils are run by caretaker councils and there is nowhere in the constitution where caretaker is mentioned. So, I don’t know what kind of democracy we are practicing. The constitution is very clear as to how these things should be done, but, unfortunately, some of them in their wisdom have constituted themselves as middlemen in the chain. They block the flow of the powers conferred by the constitution, and incidentally, nothing is done at the level where decisions or punitive measures are taken against such unwholesome decisions directly at disobeying two crystal clear provisions of the constitution. Nothing is done.
So that has become the bane of local government administration in Nigeria. I agree with you totally. There is lack of independence, because they are subsumed in the control of the state executive that things appear not to be flowing.
As a matter of fact, joint account is one of the biggest evils, because it gives the authority to local government ministries in the state. In most states, especially in the North where we don’t have oil and so on, the ministry of local government in the state is regarded as the ministry of petroleum resources. So we all know when funds are allocated to the councils. Instead of getting to the councils, they are hijacked at that level and appropriated according to the whims of the powers that be.
What is the House of Representatives under your leadership doing to halt this trend and give local government administration air of fresh breath?
You will note that all the issues we have been discussing about are constitutional issues. And you know under the constitution, we have powers. Governmental powers are carved and shared horizontally and vertically and then, only the vertical powers we have under the constitution, what is known as the concurrent list. There is the exclusive list and the residual list, which goes to the state assemblies. If you look at it, part of the confusion we run into is that the local government system under the constitution that we practise now is to some extent, by and large, subject of laws passed by the state assemblies and not the National Assembly. So, for us to tackle this problem, since they are constitutional, it means that the only avenue we have is to embark on constitution amendment. If we don’t get it on that level, I don’t think it is going to work. The truth is that you try a system and you desperately try to see that the system works, there have been court cases, there have been judicial pronouncements, but unfortunately, virtually all the key players have stuck to their guns. So, how do we do? The only way we can rescue the local government system or administration in Nigeria is by introducing amendments to the constitution and that is what we are trying to do. We attempted it in the 6th Assembly but most of the critical aspects of what we are talking about here did not scale two-thirds votes from all the state assemblies in Nigeria.
In the 7th Assembly, however, this issue of autonomy, financial autonomy of local government got endorsement of 20 state assemblies, but we needed two-thirds. So we were short of four state assemblies. It means that even if the president had assented to the Bill on Constitution Amendment, that aspect wouldn’t have scaled through. Now, the problem is this. We will have to make this local government system a bit independent. I am not saying absolute independence, because we may not achieve that since ours is a strong federation. It is not a weak federation like what you have in the United States where councils and states join their own money and then appropriate it and pay royalties in taxes to the federal government. Therefore, what we can do is make sure that in the spirit of the constitution, the local government administration is democratically elected to ensure that by provision of the constitution, that any local government that is not democratically constituted will not have access to any funding from the federation. That was the problem we had. There was this issue of Lagos creating more councils and the president, President Olusegun Obasanjo then, decided to deny them allocation from federation account before the courts said you ‘are just a trustee, you can’t do that.’ As a matter of fact, the money does not belong to the Federal Republic of Nigeria. So, we must cure that.
But unfortunately, the court did not provide a remedy, even though there is a remedy inherent in the constitution itself. The problem is that it is not working. So any remedy that is not working, is it a remedy? For instance, if a state government insists on running the affairs of the local governments on caretaker administration when the constitution clearly is insisting that it is democratically elected, or composed, that is guaranteed by the constitution, that amounts to serious violation of the provisions of the constitution, which in itself, is one of the biggest grounds for impeachment. Impeachment, when they say gross misconduct, is violation of the provisions of the constitution. That one alone is just the basis for impeachment. How many governors have been impeached in practical terms, when they appear, I am not saying they do, to have the state assemblies in their pockets? So, that is where the challenge is. We are trying to say, okay, if your local government administration is caretaker, you cannot draw funds from the federation account. That should be a provision of the constitution itself.
In addition to that, we want to ensure that they have financial autonomy. Each local government council will maintain an account with the accountant general of the federation where money due to it will directly be paid. That, of course, means that the issue of joint account is eliminated. Now, in the course of the president’s inaugural speech, he devoted a substantial time talking about local government administration in Nigeria and he talked about the injustice perpetrated by the joint account. And he did say, if I remember very well, that he would not have kept his trust with the Nigerian people if he allowed others who are under his watch to abuse their own trust. So, he clearly stated that something is going to be done about this but as long as we don’t achieve those three vital things, even if it means the state and the state assemblies will still have to exercise some form of legislative control over the area councils, the constitution has to be very clear on how local government council executives are composed. For instance, by election, the legislature is composed by election, and that they have financial autonomy. Now, that heals a lot of things. That means that no state exco can just sit and decide to suspend the chairman or even a councillor. It will not work again. It means that if a council chairman misbehaves, it will fall within the province of the council legislature to either suspend him, impeach him or whatever measures they will adopt. So that frees the local government council under the control of most of the state governors.
And to be able to achieve this, our thinking was to say even the council legislature should even legislate more for the area council. But you know, we live in a political environment, with the dynamics of politics, not all actors are rational and if these proposals were to go to the state assemblies for ratification that we need two-thirds for it to become law, if they know you are stripping them of powers, the tendency is that self-preservation is the first law of the species, they will want to say we will not deprive ourselves of this power. So, we don’t want to take it at that level first. We want to free them of control of state governors. Let them have these three areas in which they are independent. Maybe there will be a discussion about absolute independence later after these ones have been taken for the councils.
Why do you think it has been difficult for state assemblies to stop governors from emasculating the LGAs?
For the state legislature to be able to perform, they will need some level of insulation. If they are not insulated, especially from financial pressure, there is no way they can do well. I remember in the 6th Assembly too, the constitutional amendment, which we actually passed into law, contained a clause for financial autonomy for state assemblies, but apparently, to some of the actors then, speakers of state houses of assembly said it wasn’t the intention of the framers of the constitution to give them autonomy. That they didn’t want it, but they gave us that autonomy in the National Assembly. They said federal legislators could have that autonomy, but they didn’t want it at the level of the states. So it failed. And as long as they don’t have that financial autonomy at that level, so many things will continue to be wrong at the level of the state and at the local government, because they won’t have the capacity, really, truly speaking, to be able to do oversight, superintend on matters affecting the state in the area councils. So, it is a combination of the two, the three lines of intervention with respect to local councils that we talked about and then the financial autonomy for the state legislature so that the governors do not think, for instance, that they are misbehaving, and then they decide they will punish them by withholding funds. Once they are sufficiently independent, they don’t need much intervention from the state to be able to run. I believe that those key components are vital. But the overall importance of effective local government administration is something that we will talk about later. I think the situation is even worse now with caretaker committees all over the whole country. I think it is not a problem that the House of Representatives can easily solve. So we just leave that one for now.
One of the key issues affecting local government administration is how elections are conducted into the councils, with state governments being directly in charge of the process through the state independent electoral commission. Do you think SIECs can pass the credibility test, because hardly does one see an opposition party winning elections in councils?
When you say hardly does opposition win in the states, I don’t know of any state where victory by the opposition is even a reality. Even if it appears to be a reality, maybe it is an arrangement to just put one or two opposition candidates so that they can decorate the process with a political gown of democracy to say that ‘it was actually competitive.’ I don’t think that throughout the history of local government elections since 1999, when the state electoral commissions took charge, there has ever been a situation where any credible election was conducted in any state. I stand to be corrected.
You see, the point is this, he who pays the piper, they say, [calls] the tune. The state independent electoral commission, the head of those agencies are appointed by the state governors. In one of the states, I think in my state, in the last administration, it was even the political adviser to the governor that later became the chairman of the state independent electoral commission. I don’t know how independent those commissions are. The truth is they are not working, they will never work democratically. They will never work because of interest and you know the interest is with regards to this issue of financial independence of local councils. The only motivation for any chief executive to insist that all the local chairmen must be from his party is to ensure that when these funds are hijacked at the level of the state serving as the middle man, and they are shared or re-appropriated, there is no single voice of dissent. That is just the motivation. So, as long as these factors are right there, you will never get it right, they will never get it right. It is not because they don’t want get it or they cannot do it, it is just that the motivation won’t be there for them to do the right thing. So, the only right thing is just to abolish the state independent electoral commission. Like I said, they have never worked, they will never work.
So, is the House also going to abolish the SIECs?
There is that provision in the constitutional amendment, but whether it will pass or not, I want to say that it will take more than the National Assembly’s intention to see that sanity is restored to the third tier of government. It will take the intervention of the president as he rightly pointed out in his inaugural address. It will take the intervention of the media as members of the fourth estate of the realm. It will take the intervention of civil society organisations to put pressure at the level of the state. Otherwise, as I said, the motivation is very obvious, it is the same motivation that will keep this process from generating the two-thirds support that we need from state assemblies to be able to pass it. So, the president will have to talk to the APC governors, for instance, and some of the PDP governors will also have to be talked to. The media will have to be up and doing in regards to advocacy for these things to be done and civil societies, the main drivers of this thing and the community-based organisations have to go out to the state assemblies and impress on that that it is important for this to pass. If we do that, we will free the local governments and I tell you if we are able to achieve that, the benefits of independent local governments are quite humongous.
But has the House thought of the attendant problems of local government autonomy? Do you think the present local government administration councils can handle autonomy?
As I said, once you feed the resources and they have the right personnel manning the local governments, I am assured that a lot of things will change. It is not going to be like before. If you go to area councils now, how many sound people are willing to run for elections to be councillors, for instance, or local government chairman? So once the pool of leadership improves, there will be sanity. They will build on those things to ensure that there is development takes place and we are a better nation on account of that. I don’t see anything bad, because the councils will still be, to some extent, under the jurisdiction of the states when it comes to healthc are, basic education, other policies like policing and the rest. So, chances that they will create conditions that are not in sync with what is being done or coordinated by the state will not really be there because at that level, most of the things will be coordinated by the state authorities.
Finally, what effort will you tell Nigerians generally that the House of Representatives is making with regards to local governments?
That is what we have been discussing. I talked about the fact that nothing will work in the area councils unless we are able to secure some kind of independence for them and that is what we are doing in the process of amending the constitution. I talked about the fact that some of the defects are actually in the constitution and not as an account of practice. So, that is what we will be looking at.
and then