Opinions

Still on LG administration in Nigeria

AS Nigeria opted for federalism and regional self government, the eastern region was the first of the three regions to discard the N A system in 1951. The west enacted the Local Government Law 1952 establishing District Councils consisting of elected councillors who elected one of them as Chairman and a number of top Obas and chiefs depending on the situation of each council. In my district in the present Ondo state for instance, the name was changed from Mahin to the more acceptable and generic Ilaje while, rather than the Amapetu of Mahin, who had been declared sole Native Authority since 1914, the 4 Ilaje Native Courts of Mahin, Atijere, Ugbo and Agerige were collapsed and their traditional heads, the Amapetu of Mahin, Olugbo of Ugbo and the Maporure of Agerige respectively, were made permanent members with the first two being rotational presidents of the Ilaje District Council. This ingenious political engineering was deployed in several districts to solve the problems created by the N A.

Reforms in the North were wrought by a combination of agitations of the ethnic minorities through the activities of the UMBC, the mainstream Hausa, Fulani and Kanuri educated elites of the conservative Northern Peoples Congress (NPC) and radical Northern Elements Peoples Union (NEPU). According to Haliru Sirajo in his work, A History of District and Local Government Administration in the Northern Districts of Zazzau Emirate 1902-1976 (page 235), “what was certain amongst all the political blocks was that the NA system must be restructured to reflect the changing circumstances in northern Nigeria”. These agitations culminated in the enactment, by the Northern Region House of Assembly, of the NA Law No.4 1954 essentially for the democratization of the Local Administration and whittling down the overbearing powers of the Emirs.

It is apposite to remind or inform ourselves, contrary to new found argument in some quarters against state police, that the NAs had police, courts and prisons. As we have seen from Sirajo above, “restructuring” is not new in the Nigerian lexicon nor is it a preserve of any part of Nigeria. In the light of these developments, the conferences leading to Nigerian Independence thus recognised local government as a regional matter, the obvious reason LG administration was neither provided for, nor listed, in the 1960 and 1963 Nigerian federal constitutions. The situation remained the same till 1976 LG Reform of the Obasanjo/ Yaradua military regime which not only reintroduced uniform system but created Local Government by military decrees.

Enacted by Decree No 25 as amended by Decree No.104 of 1979, Section 3 First Schedule of the 1979 Constitution listed a total of 302 councils. The geopolitical breakdown shows that the North Eastern states of Borno (18), Bauchi (16), Gongola (17) had 51; North Central 48, with Benue (13), Kwara (12), Niger (9), Plateau 14; North West 53 consisting Kaduna (14), Kano (20), Sokoto (19) totalling 152 for the North. The South had 150 altogether which geopolitical distribution shows South East had 44 with the two states of Anambra (23), Imo (21); South-South 47 with Bendel (19), Cross River (17), Rivers (11); South-West had 59 with Lagos (8), Ogun (10), Ondo (17), Oyo (24).

Local govt autonomy empowering democracy at grassroots

The Babangida / Abacha / Abdusalam era

The austere Buhari/Idiagbon military administration 1983- 1985 did not create any LG and in fact abolished all created by the overthrown state governments. According to Dr. Tunde Monehin, a local government scholar, practitioner and activist in his book, “Rudiments, Principles and Practice of Local Government Administration in Nigeria (page 7), “Local Governments creation were specially made a political game by the Babangida and Abacha military administrations with Babangida creating 149 new Local Governments in May 1989, while 140 additional local governments were created between August – September 1991. General Abacha created 185 new local governments” for a total of 774 Local Councils today in Nigeria.

The Babangida regime formally entrenched the Local Government as a third tier of government in the Nigerian federation, through the 1986 Dasuki Report and the presidential system introduced in 1991 with the elected Chairman having full executive powers, to appoint supervisors, in the manner of state commissioners or federal ministers, in charge of government departments with direct allocation from the federation account. This era generally referred to as period of Local Government autonomy was when incidentally, I was the elected Chairman of the old Ilaje/Ese-Odo Local Government, Ondo state 1991-1993. Time and space will not permit a discussion of the challenges of this development as a full participant thereof, suffice it to state that the ensuing 1999 constitution did not give vent to it.