The president of Chartered Institute of Local Government and Public Administration of Nigeria and lecturer at the Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile Ife, Professor Kunle Awotokun, speaks to DARE ADEKANMBI on the task before the incoming president, Senator Bola Tinubu and how he can meet the huge expectations of Nigerians.
As a new president takes over on May 29, a couple of suggestions have been made about how the country can be made better. One of such is that we should abolish the presidential system of government for parliamentary system. What do you make of this?
The presidential system is too expensive for us as a country and I have subscribed to this opinion a long time ago. But even if we have to adopt the presidential system, it should be modified. We don’t have to follow the American style hook, line and sinker. We have so many advisers and aides appointed by politicians but who are doing practically nothing; so many aides that are not aiding anything. Given our limited resources, I think the constitution should be tinkered is such a way that the president and governors will have limited number of appointees to make to avoid the current practice of more money being spent on recurrent and overhead items rather than infrastructure that is needed for development. You will recall that a governor once appointed about 200 aides. Is that not too much? They are just paying these people till they will need their service during elections.
If we return to the parliamentary system, both the legislative and executive will be fused and this will save us a lot of money. And if there is a vote of no confidence assed in the parliament, everybody will go back home to face election again because the parliament will be dissolved. This kind of system makes politicians to be careful because they are not sure they will be re-elected after a no-confidence vote. This system would have been ideal for us as a country. But the military government that handed over power in 1999 wanted something that is similar to the military tradition they are used to, a very strong centre which is not the ideal in a heterogeneous society like ours.
As it is today, there is too much power at the centre. Nigeria’s president is the most powerful president in the whole world. It is only that he has no technological and financial muscle to back it up. There is no other democracy where the president wields so much power and influence like ours. He controls all the security apparatus. The governors are seen as the chief security officers in their states, but in reality they don’t control the police. The commissioners of police don’t listen to them until they get such orders from Abuja. This is one of the reasons why the states have not been able to secure their domains or regions. There is the need for state police that will have power and be given permission to carry arms and ammunition. If we must stick to the presidential system, it has to be reviewed. But it is better for us to switch to the parliamentary system of government.
We had this system in place in the First Republic, yet that Republic collapsed…
The fact that the First Republic collapsed does not mean the fault was from the system of government in place at that time. It was some of the operators that did not do things in the best interest of the people. The election in Western Region in 1965 was widely adjudged to be heavily compromised by federal forces trying to make inroads into the West.
What advice would you give the incoming president, Senator Bola Tinubu?
If he does not do things differently from his predecessor, then he has no business being in government. The question is: what is it that he wants to do differently? Nigerians are suffering right now and majority of the citizens are in abject penury. He has to review the existing structure. How he will be able to convince the National Assembly to do same is what I don’t know. But he has to send to them a lot of executive bills aiming at restructuring of the country and the review of the existing political structure in the country. He needs a team of people to think-tank outside the box. He needs a lot of technocrats to work with him in different areas of national life. His own work is to coordinate what these people will be doing. Chief Obafemi Awolowo had a lot of experts around him. He picked Professor Aluko, in education, Chief Adekunle Ajasin and Pa Alayande. What Awo did then was to coordinate. If you have a proposal, you will have to convince Papa Awo before he will sell it to the public and he was a very deep leader intellectually himself.
I expect Tinubu to have known our challenges as a country by now and he should hit the ground running. The question of waiting for six months to assemble a cabinet is embarrassing. Between when a president is declared winner of an election and the time he is sworn in is enough for a serious-minded individual to assemble a crack team.
Tinubu created 37 LCDAs as governor of Lagos State and President Olusegun Obasanjo withheld the federal allocations to the 20 councils. Tinubu won in Supreme Court. What kind of a local government system do you envisage under him?
Even in the reform of 1976 which Obasanjo championed with Musa Yar’Adua, there was provision for the creation of LCDAs which ordinarily will transform to local governments in the future. So, there was nothing wrong in what Tinubu did at that time. Lagos has 20 local government areas which are not enough to cater for the large population it has. Alimosho Local Government Area alone is bigger in terms of population than many states in Nigeria. So, under Tinubu as president, I would like to see a situation where states can create local government areas. We have once recommended that local government councils should be created every 10 years. After the conduct of census, if it is seen that the population figure of a local government has doubled, that council should automatically be divided into two. A local government should have limited number of population it will cater for. Invariably, all the local government councils in Nigeria now are due for splitting into two each. That is 786 multiplied by two. Lagos, for instance, should have more than 40 local government areas. Much as I would like to see more local government created and enshrined in the constitution, they should also enjoy reasonable autonomy.
What kind of National Assembly do you think Tinubu needs to move the country forward?
Sincerely speaking, I want a fully democratic National Assembly that will be free to choose its leaders. The candidates that the party chooses for them are compromised leaders and to that extent, there is no way the institution can be independent.
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