Members of the Lagos House of Assembly have called for formal listing of the existing 37 Local Council Development Areas (LCDAs) in the state as full-fledged Local Government Areas (LGAs) by the National Assembly.
Daily Trust reports that the 37 LCDAs were created by President Bola Tinubu in 2003 when he was governor of Lagos State.
But the legislators at a sitting presided over by the Speaker of the House, Mudashiru Obasa, on Monday, pushed for the constitutional backing for the LCDAS.
Already, the legislature is considering a “Bill for a Law to Provide for the Local Government System, Establishment and Administration, and to Consolidate All Laws on Local Government Administration.”
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It was reported that the bill sought to scrap the existing LCDAs, but Obasa denied the allegation.
After the last week’s public hearing on the bill, the Assembly on Monday agreed to conduct another public hearing on the proposed legal framework.
The House also invited the Attorney-General of the State, Lawal Pedro, for an interpretation of the recent Supreme Court judgement on financial autonomy for local governments.
Obasa said the review of the Local Government Administration law is not aimed at scrapping the LCDAs but to further strengthen them.
“I agree on the need for us to schedule a second allotted day for the public hearing,” the Speaker said while adding that he had been inundated with calls by people who wanted to know the fate of the LCDAs.
“We are not scrapping the LDCAs. Rather, what we are trying to do is to look at the recent Supreme Court judgement in terms of Lagos and local governments joint account and fashion out a way where the parent local governments and the LDCAs work together without the LDCAs shortchanged,” he added.
The Speaker also agreed on the need to work for the formal listing of the LCDAs by the National Assembly.
“Kano has 44 local governments and out of Kano, Jigawa was created and has 27,” he said as he suggested a review of the revenue sharing formula by the Revenue Mobilisation Allocation and Fiscal Commission.
The Chairman of the Committee on Local Government, Hon. Sanni Okanlawon, had, while giving a report on the public hearing earlier conducted by the committee, said that many of the stakeholders invited for the event could not make it.
Supporting Hon. Okanlawon’s request, his colleague, Hon. Ladi Ajomale said: “A lot of people are saying they do not understand what is going on and maybe the government is trying to wipe some people out of the local government system.”
He also called for a liaison and better collaboration with the National Assembly with the aim of making the upper legislature understand why the LDCAs should be listed as substantive local governments.
On his part, Hon. Desmond Elliot noted that because of the size of Lagos in terms of population and its economic importance to Nigeria, it was imperative to work for the listing of the LCDAs.
“Anambra state has 21 local governments and it is nowhere close to what Lagos has in terms of resources, economic importance and dividends of democracy,” he said.
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