The FCT Minister, Nyesom Wike, has berated the area councils’ chairmen in the nation’s capital for failing to discharge their responsibilities to the residents.
The minister, who spoke while defending the N1.2 trillion 2024 budget before the National Assembly joint committees on the FCT, said the chairmen had fallen short of the expectations of their residents despite having their monthly federal allocations and the 10% of Internally Generated Revenue (IGR) accruing to the FCT.
Wike warned that he would no longer tolerate their lacklustre attitudes to development as the nation’s capital needs accelerated development, which the area councils must take as a priority.
He said, “So, I have told them, if they continue to constitute this, I will seize their 10% IGR and I will tell them what to do because what they are doing now is not normal.
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‘’I was chairman of a council. And the governor then, Dr Peter Odili, called us and say look, the city is dirty. Who will they call? Will they call area councils?
“They were owing teachers, they were owing NULGE. Teachers refused to go back to school. FCT teachers are on strike. They are not our teachers. They are area councils’ teachers. NULGE are not our staff. They are area councils’ staff. Nobody talks about that. What they are interested in is the FCT.
“So, what we did was to say, look, it’s embarrassing for teachers not to go to school and our children are at home. We called them. How much are you owing the teachers? You are owing them N600 million. Fine. You pay 60%, we pay 40% so that our teachers can go back to school.
‘’So, you can’t be collecting 10% of our IGR and then you will not allow us to even collect the IGR and you are collecting 10%. We are seeing the money you have at the end of every month. If we have N27 billion, 10% of that is N2.7 billion set aside for them to share.”
