Sagay - Local governments need more supervision

Prof. Itse Sagay is a former Dean, Faculty of Law, University of Benin. He speaks on the local government system. DGossip247 reports

What is your take on the development at the local government level, especially the dissolutions of their leadership?

It is very clear from the constitution that local government chairmen are to be democratically elected and not appointed. And so judgements from High Courts and Appeal Courts have stated again and again that governors have no right to dissolve local governments.

The provision for them is the same as the same provision for the election of governors. So, it is illegal to dissolve a local government because you did not elect it. However, it is a different thing when a court says an election is invalid like the case of Rivers State local councils. That means the parties have to return to the status quo and we have to look at what the status quo was.

How do you see the issue of joint accounts between the states and local governments?

As far as the issue of joint account of states and local government is concerned, that is a very complex political question to answer. To start with, people make the mistake to say that local governments should be independent and should have autonomy because in a federation there are only two federating entities – Federal Government and state government. Local governments are not part of the federating entities; local governments are part of the state entity. Secondly, in practice, I have found that most of these local governments don’t do anything.

They get all of these monies at the end of the month, they sit down and share it among themselves and they wait for the next allocation. So, it is now practical necessity that state governments which are now carrying out the responsibility of local governments, for example, states that are paying the salaries of teachers in primary schools and carrying the whole burden of primary schools, building roads in local government areas, even building markets as we have seen for example that Lagos State was the one who built the Tejuosho market.

So, with all these things, it becomes difficult to say that they should not interfere with the money that is coming to the local governments. So, it is not a simple and straightforward matter at all. It is only wrong for state governments to take that money and misuse it, but it is another matter to take the money because the local governments are not doing their job.

How do we wriggle out of this and do you support the notion that they should be scrapped?

I don’t think they should be scrapped. We must begin to learn how to make them function as they should. I think they need more supervision from the state governments; we need a state government that must insist that the chairmen must do their jobs. So, we shouldn’t scrap them, we should just develop them. One other thing we can think of if these selected ones do not work is to look at the appointment of local government chairmen.