Yesterday good; today bad

This is not an attempt to romanticise the past. It is an attempt to show that we have been more or less developing backwards. I take the local government system as a good example. By the say-so of the khaki politicians, it replaced the native authority system introduced by our British colonial masters. The only reason I can find for this change of name is that as an independent nation, we are no longer natives in Nigeria. We needed to throw off that colonial cloak and re-position the same system as local government. You cannot have native administration where there are no natives. After all, all politics is local. So, local government is it. Makes sense.

I have not read the Dasuki local government reforms of the Murtala/Obasanjo administration. But I wonder if it redefined the functions of the local government councils as a new system of government rather than an old system of government with a new name. The more I recall the Idoma Native Authority of my youth and what it did to push us along the path of modern development, the more I feel sorry for the many experiments by the generals that have left our country confused and compounded its many problems.

Idoma NA was not a rich NA. That honour belonged to Kano NA, the richest in the Northern Region. But fully guided by the colonial philosophy of grass roots government, Idoma NA did what none of the nine local governments that rose from its ashes has been able to do. Idoma NA took care of itself and functioned as it should, as a good government close to the people. It set up, funded and successfully ran its own NA police and its prison service. It founded a unique Eton-style primary boarding school, NA Senior Primary School, Otobi.

I would not know if it received any monthly allocation from the Northern Regional government but it received nothing from the federation account. The NA system in the Northern Region was entirely the responsibility of the regional government. It was profoundly efficient, not least because of both the unambiguous sense of direction and the quality of personnel. Young northern graduates grew their administrative teeth by first becoming assistant divisional officers and went on to become divisional officers and thence permanent secretaries. By the time they reached that level, they were steeped in the mores of both native and regional administration. And governance moved smoothly.

Things have since changed for the worse at the local government level. Unemployed or unemployable men and women are the local government chairmen. The councillors are a motely crowd drawn from the same pool. With the local government as the third tier of government, we were supposed to have made a great leap in governance at federal, state and local government levels with the reforms that brought about the new system. We made no such leap. We have been held earth-bound by a system that continues to be abused and crippled by those who have the constitutional duty to make it work.

The first major mistake was to promote the local government as a third tier of government. I still cannot put my fingers on the wisdom of creating three tiers of government. Perhaps, this was no more than an emotional reaction of an independent country rejecting the colonial philosophy of government. The first benefit we reaped from the local government as the third tier of government is the present crowd of governments in the country. A cool 811 of them. We expect to make progress with this crowd, most of which cannot meet their statutory obligations as governments. It is naïve, foolish even.

We have 774 local governments as per the fifth schedule. In addition, some of the states also have development areas. These were the local government areas the governors created during the Obasanjo administration. The president rejected them as unconstitutional. For that reason, he refused to give them their share from the federation account.

No problem, the governors said. They down graded the new local government areas to development areas. And they did what was clearly unconstitutional in the circumstances but were never challenged. They shared and still share the money allocated to the constitutionally recognised local governments from which the development areas were created, with the development areas.

These development area councils function fully as local government councils with their duly elected chairmen and councillors. Nobody has bothered to correct this constitutional anomaly. There is no such thing as development area in the constitution. This problem arose because we still refuse to let the local governments be the business of the state governments. State governors created them because the more local governments a state has the more it reaps from the federation account.

Perhaps, this is the least of the problems the local government system faces. Anyone who cares to look would see that the local government system is effectively crippled and has become an unnecessary burden on our centralised, military federalism. Their allocations from the federation account are hijacked by the state governors under the local government joint accounts. The quality of personnel at the local government level in many of the states is so poor generally that their attempts to move forward are hobbled by lack of educated and experienced men and women.

We no longer know what role the local governments play or are supposed to play. They are unable to drive grass roots development. They are unable to run primary schools because they cannot fund them. In many of the northern states, primary school teachers are on strike for most of the year. Yet, the primary school is the foundation of education. In concentrating on the sheer number of post primary and tertiary institutions, we refuse to see that no educational development takes place any where in the world without a good, solid foundation at the primary school level.

Here is another constitutional anomaly. The state governors introduced interim local government administration to keep the local governments under their thumbs. This goes all the way back to the second republic. The governors fill the local government interim administration with their acolytes and thugs. The local governments have become the means by which political thugs are rewarded by the state governors. And what is more galling is that the local government as a third tier of government reflects on our poor appreciation of democracy and constitutional government. If party A wins the government of a state, all the local government councils in the state must belong to it because it is the governor’s party. Is this part of the philosophy of the third tier of government?

As Buhari prepares to step into his second and final term as president, I urge him to spare a thought for the crippled third tier of government. It is unhelpful to maintain a system that ill serves our governance and development needs. Let him summon the courage to introduce a constitutional amendment abolishing the third tier of government and let the local governments be the business of the state governors. We do not need three tiers of government. Two would do nicely, thank you.