Special Adviser to the Lagos State Governor on Communities and Communications, Honourable Kehinde Bamigbetan, speaks with some journalists on the inter relationship between local governments and Community Development Associations (CDAs) and the gains that have accrued to the state through such partnership. BOLA BADMUS brings these excerpts:
HOW would you assess the level of community participation in governance compared to what you met on ground? How far have you been able to address the challenges issues met on ground?
First, let me say that before this ministry was created, there was the Ministry of Rural Development and the ministry managed the CDCs and Community Development Associations (CDAs) and when they were brought to the ministry of Local Government, their coming created a symbiotic relationship between the CDCs and the local government system.
The second was to see how to better regulate the CDA/CDC process. First, we began to have monthly interactive sessions, where we bring ministries, departments and agencies (MDAs) to come and explain what they intend to do and seek the backing of the CDAs. Before MDAs could embark on anything, they usually come to this forum and test their ideas and they get instant feedbacks which usually prove advantageous. More people get to know what we are doing, having decentralised things. So, these people are able to get first-hand information of government programmes and policies.
For example, at our maiden sitting in Epe, a woman was able to let us know that if a big tree fell on the road or a major event happened between Epe and Ajah, there would have been no other road to pass. She gave a graphic description between Epe and Ajah, village to village. The forum has greatly enriched the work of public workers at Alausa or elsewhere. For instance, when the Ministry of Housing was looking for places to build houses, it came to this kind of forum and people told them where they could get land for such purpose.
We also organised leadership programmes for CDAs and CDCs because we realised that it is through CDAs that we can easily do relationship management. How do you bring people to attend your CDAs if they don’t have any stake in it? They would not come. Through the trainings, we have exposed them to how they can make the CDAs relevant to everybody in the community. We have also tried to bring in the private sector, especially companies in the neighbourhood to add value to what our communities are doing. We are after the relationship between the people and the CDAs. We went on a tour of all the CDAs, during which we audited the relationship between the CDAs and CDCs and between the CDCs and the local governments. Through these tours, we were able to identify the areas of obstacles and engage the stakeholders so that by the time we finished, we had developed a stronger web among them. There were instances, for example, where the CDAs and local governments were at loggerheads and we used that intervention to bring them together that they have to work together. There are subventions that local governments were meant to give to CDAs, which many of them couldn’t secure until we started this intervention. Many of them now saw the need to start giving the CDAs subventions. In fact, some of them owed subventions running to two to three years and immediately some of them raised cheques and signed them out based on that intervention.
We have also started using the CDAs not just for policy formulation, but for execution. For example, when we were going to do the 114 roads, we met with all the CDAs and gave them a template on how to monitor the projects. For instance, the moment the contractors come to site, they were supposed to hold a meeting with the contractors who were supposed to give them a profile of the project which must include the value of the project, the duration, the various artisans needed in case such could be found within the community and how he feels the CDAs could assist him.
There were communities where landlords had to sacrifice their fences so that the road dimension can be achieved and we were able to do all these things and be able to put the 114 roads in place without any major clashes because wherever the contractors had issues, we came in to speak to the CDAs and the CDAs understood.
Our tour also revealed that many of the CDAs are still encumbered by the old system of recordings. For example, you have to register and every year, you have to renew. In the course of the tour, we found out that because the system has not been improved over time, many of the CDAs have even forgotten they needed to renew their CDAs. Some of the CDAs were not even registered for example. So that enable us to bring everybody to one point and we now have index, a state wide directory that tells us the numbers of those that were registered. That is why the governor could announce that two years ago, we had 3,000 CDAs, now, we had 3,900 CDAs. We are encouraging more and more people to come up and register their CDAs so that they can be part of the process of developing the state.
One of the things we also do is that this office also serves to collate and disperse information. Some CDAs come and say our roads are bad. We go to Lagos State Public Works Corporation (LSPWC), with a covering letter listing all the roads and the CDAs making the requests. We could even attach the pictures showing the state of those roads, and request the agency to help list them in their next round of rehabilitation. And of course, the fact that I used to be chairman of a local government who had also developed this system in that local government has helped me because I was already aware of the system. As chairman of Ejigbo LCDA, I moved the number of CDAs from 15 to 76 within six years. That helped a lot on some of the intricacies of CDAs to be able to manage this office.
People are of the view that local government administration is virtually dead in the country because there was a time we used to hear about ALGON and there was also a time when we see newspapers, TV stations and the media generally celebrating local governments on roads, education, among others, but all that has gone and now we are talking of the ascendancy of CDAs. If that is so, are you also pushing for the abolition of local governments for being irrelevant now?
I think it is the other way round. I think the idea is to encourage CDAs to push the local governments to perform better. I think that is the role we are trying to make them play. For example, in the case of 114 road projects, they were able to monitor many of those road projects and gave an independent report. And because they were monitoring, the local government staff became much more careful because they knew the CDAs had direct access to the governor to enable him know what is happening in those local governments. That helped a lot.
Accountability is another area, you know. Current the law says the local governments are supposed to publish their accounts on notice boards at the local government secretariats. That means they need the CDAs and CDCs to be carried along to enable them ascertain how local governments funds are being used and we have tried in that area.
And for me, the problem with our democracy right now is lack of popular participation. Our people are being alienated from political process and the people who are benefiting are the politicians. When more people take interest in what is happening, the more we are going to get politicians who are more responsible. So, I see it as a personal passion to energise the base and when you energise the base, you will have productive politics. I see that our people are generally docile. They don’t want to bother about what is happening around them and unless we correct it, unless our people are ready to tell the chairman, you’ve collected N2million, for God’s sake what have you done with it? If we are not asking those questions, we cannot blame the chairman for being the problems of the council. For me, it’s a divine opportunity being here. It is a silent crusade to empower the people, to ask the questions and luckily many of the people at CDAs are retired professionals who don’t need freebies. They are even landlords who have built their houses. So, they are not people who would be looking for chairmen to give them money and so they should be able to speak the truth, but government needs to encourage them to do so.
and then