THEY have done their job, or what they considered to be one of their jobs. I mean members of the National Assembly (NASS), comprising the House of Representatives and the House of Senate. ‘Anaghi eji ututu ama njo ahia’ or morning does not often define how the day turns out. Not in the case of Nigeria’s 10th national assembly.
The direction of the extant NASS was crystal clear from the get go. The composition of the handpicked (by Nigeria’s president, Alhaji Bola Ahmed Tinubu) leadership left nobody in doubt about the set up. The chairman of NASS had a case of alleged corruption by the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) swirling over him up to the minute of his taking the oath of office as the president of the Senate. Obong Godswill Akpabio was an uncommon two-term governor of Akwa Ibom State with ‘uncommon’ achievements. He was a minister of the federal republic who made uncommon revelations at a National Assembly hearing which led to the hunters screaming ‘off the mic’ (microphone) in the heat of the hearing. The House committee hearing was being broadcast live on national television and committee members were bent on stopping Nigerians from hearing and knowing that they (reps and senators) were part of the rot in the corruption -riddled Niger Delta Development Commission (NDDC). On another day on the same issue, the then head of the intervention agency had to embark on a fainting spree when he was overwhelmed with questions about the sleaze in the organisation.
There’s a cliché that birds of the same plume flock together. Like begets like. Show me your friends and I will tell you who you are. So the leadership of the National Assembly was created in the image of the leadership of the Executive branch of Nigeria’s government. And Nigerians are living the experience.
The presidential system of government which we claim we borrowed from the United States of America was designed with inbuilt subtle, and sometimes pronounced tensions among the three co-equal branches of government – the Executive, the Legislature and the Judiciary. The tension is often more pronounced between the Executive and the Parliament. But this is not so in our country. In the last 25 years, the tendency for the parliament to exert its autonomy has been far and in-between. The closest Nigeria came to experiencing the independence of the NASS was when Dr. Olusola Saraki was the president of the Senate and chairman of NASS during the first term (2015-2019) of Nigeria’s affliction of a president, Maj-Gen. Muhammadu Buhari. It must be said that it did not happen by design. It was a fallout of personal scheming to grab power and to control the direction of that regime.
The current leadership of NASS has been vocal about its subordination to the presidency so much so that if it happens to do the will of Nigerians, it will only be to the extent that the will of Nigerians aligned with the will of the president who installed them in office. In other words, if the will of the citizens of the country conflicts with the desires of the president, the will of the people will be invalid to the extent of its conflict with the desires of Tinubu. And this has been demonstrated on more than one occasion in the past 14 months of this dispensation. In summary we are living in an era of government of the president, by the president, for the president. A civilian dictatorship is in full swing at the federal level.
So we can only hope for a push back from some quarters at the subnational levels. But it will be important to recognise that even as we hope for a push back that the governors in the states are no better in terms of exhibiting democratic temperaments. Many of them are apprentice dictators waiting to blossom. If you want to know their stranglehold, visit any state when the governor is out of town. Nothing pertaining to government and governance happens. The deputy governor who should act going by the provisions of the Constitution in the absence of the governor is paralysed and crippled. Anything the deputy governor does is interpreted as an attempt to upstage the governor and a display of inordinate and vaulting ambition. It is rare for a governor and his deputy who were supposedly elected on a joint ticket to finish their joint tenure together. Some governors use and discard, through impeachments, as many as three deputy governors in two terms of eight years. This is a story for another day.
For today’s discourse we will pretend to believe that the dictatorial tendencies of state governors can be put to good use for once and for the benefit of Nigerians. It can be so used in opposing the ongoing multipronged schemes on the so-called reform of the local government area councils. The approaches may be multipronged but they are coming from the same source – the Presidency. First, the Presidency went to the Supreme Court where it sued the states, saying that it wanted the court to rule on the financial and administrative autonomy of the 774 local government areas in Nigeria. It also said it wanted the Supreme Court to decree that no state government has the power to arbitrarily terminate the tenure of elected local council governments. It also prayed the court to grant it the power to seize federal allocations to any council which is not run by elected officials and to scrap the state/council joint bank account which the governors use as slush fund. Ordinarily, these are lofty goals which should excite every citizen. But not so fast because in this dispensation nothing is ordinary.
The second route the Presidency is using to appropriate the local government areas (LGA’s) to itself is through the National Assembly. Last week there were media reports that the NASS has granted full financial and administrative autonomy to all councils by amending section 124 of the Constitution. The reports say that the section makes a consequential provision for making the councils full third tier of government without undue interference from the state governments. The House and the Senate, the news reports say, have harmonised the differences in their positions on the subject matter and the bill is set to be forwarded to the state houses of assembly for a concurrence by at least two-thirds of the legislatures of the 36 states.
This is the stage where the governors should use their dictatorial powers to lean on their houses of assembly to reject the amendment. The governors do not need much prodding, or any prodding at all, because they have at least once in the past torpedoed a similar amendment. The governors did so in the pursuit of their selfish interests and nothing suggests they will not do so again this time.
Though the motivation of the governors in rejecting the local government areas amendment bill will be clearly personal and selfish, but it will align ultimately with the interests of the generality of Nigerians. Making the existing 774 council areas a third tier of government, financially and administratively autonomous presupposes that they are components of Nigeria’s federating units. They are not. And they should not be. We will be the first to admit that our federation is awkward but we should not allow our myopic rulers to continue to make a bad situation worse.
For a start, the names of the current 774 council areas have no business being written into the 1999 Constitution. So if any amendment is needed in reforming local government structure and administration in Nigeria, it is to remove councils from the federal Constitution immediately. The states should be at liberty to create units of administration at the local level, and to create as many as they may desire and to fund them. It is preposterous to argue in a federal system of government that local councils should be receiving statutory allocations from the federation account.
Our heritage of long military rule did consequential damage to our country including in the arbitrary creation of states. But it was worse in the carving out of local government areas. There are parts of this country where full fledged local government areas have minimal human presence. They are just a vast mass of land with sparse human settlements in flimsy houses.
It was this arbitrary creation of states and local governments that accounts for the absurdity of the present situation in the old Kano State and Lagos State. We are almost sounding like a broken record but we will not stop illustrating with it. Lagos State and old Kano State were about the same size in population. Later, Jigawa State was carved out of Kano State. Lagos remained unchanged. Today Kano and Jigawa states have a combined 71 local government areas while Lagos state has 20. In effect, the old Kano state gets 71 separate allocations from the federation account, and Lagos draws only 20. That will make it three and a half times more federal allocations to old Kano State than Lagos. Where’s the fairness? Where’s the equity? Where’s the justice?
Sadly, the man who is today in the Aso Rock Villa as Nigeria’s president was governor of Lagos State a little over two decades ago. He battled then president, Chief Olusegun Obasanjo, over the creation of local governments. Tinubu created an additional 37 council areas for Lagos. Obasanjo impounded the federal allocations to the 20 LGAs, saying that the funds could be used by Tinubu to fund his 37 new creations which were not known to the Constitution. The matter ended in the Supreme Court where each party claimed victory of sorts.
So, if Tinubu claimed over 20 years ago that local governments should be the exclusive preserve of the states, and he stood on a solid ground, why is the same man using subterfuge (litigation in the Supreme Court and legislation through NASS) to force administrative autonomy for councils and their financial freedom from state governments? Does this not confirm that he is an opportunist and a pseudo -democrat? But he will not fail to act to type.
In 2012, Tinubu wrote an epistle to former president, Dr. Goodluck Jonathan, on the dangers of removing the so-called subsidy in petroleum products. He was spot on. But in 2023, he did exactly the opposite of the same thing he warned against, and threw the economy into a spin and the people into penury. So as in local governments, so also in petrol subsidy removal. Tinubu’s bonafides as an untruthful, unreliable person, and an opportunist are in plain sight.
But he can still redeem himself by working with the state governors and the National Assembly to do the right thing on local governments – stop their affiliation with the Federal Government, remove their names from the Constitution, let the states create as many councils as they wish and fund them. Manipulating local governments for personal, political and electoral reasons is not in the best interest of our distorted and troubled federation.
